“Curiosity killed the cat,
But satisfaction brought it back.”
Curiosity is linked to desire for learning — for seeking new knowledge even when its application is not immediately evident. This is a foundational component of developing critical thinking.
Curiosity can lead us to learn more things, or to learn more about a thing. Curiosity makes us want to learn more. It’s a powerful thing to pique. If you want to teach someone, make them curious.
Is curiosity enough?
As a somewhat unsettling observation, a high level of curiosity does not necessarily correlate with the same level of truth-seeking, or the evaluation of evidence to challenge the status quo or to decide between competing points of view. This may be an artifact of a classroom arrangement that’s largely passive, where the onus to have convictions about topics learned is weak or absent.
Outside the classroom, however, knowledge gets increasingly put to work in the pursuit of truths. Truths get put to work in helping us make decisions.
In a decision-making scenario, we usually have the option to exploit or explore. Do we try to expand our current roles, or to find new ones? Do we improve the designs of a print piece, or foray into digital completely? (These decisions are usually nudged along by external factors regardless of what we prefer, but we’ll have our leanings.)
The greater your curiosity, the more likely you may be to explore — to seek innovations even when the status quo is entirely acceptable. There is much to be said for exploiting, too, in the right situations: growing, developing, refining, strengthening and deepening. It takes experience to recognize when to go one way or the other.
Crowd curiosity
Is the group smarter than any individual within the group? Maybe, maybe not.
Is a group more or less curious than an individual? Some evidence shows that social influence by virtue of connectivity shifts the balance of exploiting versus exploring. In less challenging experimental environments, well-connected groups did better in search problems than less well-connected groups. When the environment got more complex, less well-connected groups took longer to explore but found better long-term solutions.
Does curiosity serve us better in an outside-in approach to solving problems (à la “Does this make sense?”), or in an inside-out approach away from the problem (à la “Why doesn’t this make sense?”)
I would argue that curiosity is the Möbius strip that threads through all of our creative problem-solving strategies.
[All views expressed in this post are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or any other entity with which I may be associated.]
