I am a curiosity/intelligence researcher, AMA. (Seriously, I am.)
This article reads like un-researched folk psychology rather than science, which is fine I guess, but I would take it all with skepticism.
I'll note that based on my and others' research, it seems to be better to have state curiosity (curiosity about the task at hand) rather than trait curiosity (as in, claiming to be a person with a high curiosity personality trait). Trait curiosity gets you almost nothing: no better learning outcomes, no better performance, and no better recall (in complex problem solving anyway; results are sometimes different in trivial pursuits, but who cares about that [edit: I shouldn't say it that way. I was being glib. From a scientific knowledge standpoint, of course we are curious about how curiosity works in trivial matters!]).
I don't believe there is a way to boost your state (task) curiosity. I'd also be skeptical that you can boost your trait curiosity.
Anyway, one of the main problems with curiosity research is the difficulty in even defining curiosity to a high degree of consensus. I would suggest that as you read this thread, you will see various meanings.
Is curiosity a desire to gain knowledge? Is it a desire to see if you are right or wrong? Is it a drive to test existing hypotheses? Is it a motivation sparked by novelty or uncertainty?
I would genuinely be interested in knowing what you, dear reader, think curiosity really is. :)
So question, what sort of overlap do you see between trait curiosity and state curiosity, and if trait curiosity doesn't get you those things, is the implication that state curiosity does?
Where does retrospection lie with regard to curiosity?
I read the explanation on Wikipedia[1] and am honestly less clear, as their example gives me the impression of trait curiosity. I like to dig into what I'm doing to really understand what makes it tick, I hate memorizing things and desire to know why things are the way they are, not just that they are, is that an example of state curiosity?
To answer your question, I would say curiosity is all those things. If I understand these two types correctly and I was trying to define them as narrowly as possible, I'd say that state curiosity is a desire to understand patterns and their significance, whereas trait curiosity is the desire for more novel information and experiences.
In fact, in many of our experiments, trait curiosity is a moderately good inverse predictor of state curiosity (negative correlation). In other words, if you rate yourself as a generally highly curious person, then we can slightly predict that you will not be curious about the task at hand. This slight anticorrelation is unusual! I think that some people like to see themselves as generally curious, but maybe not many people really are? Dunno for sure, though.
> if trait curiosity doesn't get you those things, is the implication that state curiosity does?
Yes. State curiosity, or rating high curiosity about the task at hand, gets better results in complex problem solving. There might be some sort of affinity effect. If you like complex problems, then you're more curious about complex problems, and therefore tend to do better at them. Maybe? Makes some sense.
Causation is difficult to show. Are you curious because you are good at it and want to know if you're right? Are you good at it because your curiosity has led you practice and learn how to solve these problems? Still, the effect is consistently there.
> Where does retrospection lie with regard to curiosity?
Probably depends on what you mean. Curiosity can be both relatively fleeting and quite long lasting given differing circumstances, so I'm not sure I can say much without clarification.
> is that an example of state curiosity?
First, I'd say that wiki stub about state/trait is lacking. I can see why you'd be confused. I do not recall reading a great "here's what state/trait are", just more like reading 1000s of papers. The research on the personality trait of curiosity and the state of being task-oriented curious perhaps surprisingly do not overlap very much. Your example could be an example of either trait or state. If generally you like to know how things work, then that might indeed be an example of trait curiosity. When you want to know how this $widget right in front of you works, and you spend time taking it apart and reassembling it until you are satisfied, then that might be an example of state curiosity. And so you can be one without the other. You can want to know how things work, without really bothering to investigate. Or you can not want to know how everything works, but really want to know how this one $widget works. Or both. There's nothing that says you cannot be both. The anticorrelation is 1) weak, and 2) not necessarily causal.
What it 'really is' is mostly a construction, an amalgam of perceptions that are usually descriptions of observers of what other people seem to do when they find things out or how they've got to discovering something. What you call trait curiosity is, it seems to me, a consequence of the fact that curiosity is of course sexy and highly desirable. If you read popular science books that's what they tell you, there are some people that are curious and just wanting to know stuff and just like that they get Nobel prizes.
I think trait curiosity works similarly with other traits that people can fall into the trap of ascribing to themselves. For example, telling others that you are hard working, never giving up, always being there for people or whatever. Once you start repeating to yourself and to others such statements you can in a sense 'lock yourself' into it. You get into situation where you start thinking 'well, a curious person in this situation should do this, I better do it or else I'm not curious'. I think this is the difference in outcome in trivial pursuits as you say.
On the other hand it's very difficult to be curious about something you really know nothing or very little about. It really makes little sense to be curious about cryptography or quantum computing if you struggled with high school algebra and never made any serious effort to improve your skills and understanding.
Of course none of this is to claim that there is no such thing as pursuing knowledge or ideas without seemingly any external motivation. The way it looks from the inside I think is usually you have to have some idea of what you're doing and you want to see if you can apply this to something else. Counterintuitively, here you're trying to see if something that should be considered different is in fact some slight modification of what you already know. So it's usually not "let's learn something completely new because I like to learn things and am curious" but "let's see if I can reformulate this thing that looks unknown to something that I know". This is the creative part where you are actually learning. The process of reformulating or restating something with a language that you understand and you've built for yourself, bringing in the new idea, often not explicitly stated to be connected with what you know, is what gives you the kick.
I would go on and say that excessive trait curiosity can be detrimental to your long-term business success by simply not being able to stubbornly focus on crucial areas/problems — It's an easy excuse for not trying hard enough.
I think there is at least some truth to this. I am a notoriously multi-interest-having person. I want to know a lot, and deeply so, about a lot of things. That might be sufficient to say I qualify as having trait curiosity. Regardless, what it definitely does do is get me side tracked onto many other interesting tangents. This can be beneficial or detrimental depending on the situation. It can lead me to solve a bunch of crazy problems, and also to neglect some real, pressing issues for too long.
I’ve heard scientific research described as very slightly expanding the bubble of the knowledge of all humanity. That one area of research is like a tiny bubble expanding on the perimeter of the whole of knowledge.
Using that metaphor, curiosity to me is the desire to expand small bubbles on the perimeter of the bubble of my knowledge. It may manifest in all the ways you mentioned. Why is this I’m doing not working? Or simply wondering “why can’t lions purr?” and expanding my bubble that tiny amount for no practical reason but to do so.
> I would genuinely be interested in knowing what you, dear reader, think curiosity really is.
For me it's mostly defining the undefined. I don't do it for the sake of gaining knowledge, it's more like "oh, so that's how it works". I like the feeling of taking something that feels like a magical black box and systematically breaking it down to the point where it doesn't feel magical anymore. Often times you only need a little bit more than a surface level understanding to get to this point.
> I like the feeling of taking something that feels like a magical black box and systematically breaking it down to the point where it doesn't feel magical anymore.
This is also a good working definition of “engineering”.
> Is curiosity a desire to gain knowledge? Is it a desire to see if you are right or wrong? Is it a drive to test existing hypotheses? Is it a motivation sparked by novelty or uncertainty?
It would be odd to describe it as an emotional motivation and not a behaviour.
I'd say the behaviour is a pursuit of not immediately necessary information. The subject is drawn to unravel unknowns in their environment. It might be broadly focussed to flip every stone or narrow to a subject e.g. people or a topic.
The various motivations for this behaviour probably encompasses all human motivations. It might be delight/entertainment/play of discovery, collector/completionist type obsession, fear/anxiety/pessimism/paranoia of unknowns, ego preservation to be the "one who knows", procrastination in the face of aversive tasks...
> It would be odd to describe it as an emotional motivation and not a behaviour.
On the contrary, I can certainly imagine (from experience :-) ) being curious about something but too lazy to actually find out. Just like someone can be hungry but too lazy to go out and get food, but they're still hungry (I'm not sure whether such a person could be described as "greedy" though). I think that all confirms the parent comment's point that some forms of curiosity don't lead to better outcomes.
I do not think anyone is suggesting it is not a behavior, but what seems curious about it is the question of motivation, given that it quite often is a voluntary behavior with little or no prospect of having tangible benefits outside of that person's mental state.
I approach this question from the perspective of people management. I was always taught to hire people who are (a) self-motivated and do not need constant nagging/encouragement to do their job (b) technically proficient and do not need a year of OJT to be productive (c) self-learning. If I could hire this person, all I need to do is point where we are going.
By self-learning, I want a person who digs beyond the surface and understands communication is fundamentally flawed as people are flawed. People do not communicate clearly. Sometimes on purpose. A "curious" person in my mind is comfortable with the confusion and actively tries to clear up the confusion and digs deep to truly understand what is really be asked, what is being said or not said.
This is my opinion. I do not think there is a strong consensus on what state and trait curiosity actually are, though I think the following is reasonable.
Trait curiosity is generally thought of as people who exhibit a broad desire to learn, to be open to new experiences, and to be creative, for example. If you like reading books on a wide variety of topics, or studying a range of fields in school or personal life, then you might have a curious personality trait. In this case, it is generally thought that you will rate certain questions on the Big Five Index [BFI] or the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory ver. 2 [CEI-II] more highly than others. I do not research trait curiosity. I collect data on it, but it's not that useful to me, really.
Instead, I do computational modelling of human behavior using performance on discrete tasks and ratings about those tasks, which is more like state curiosity. If you are solving puzzles, or answering math/logic problems, or recalling difficult memory tasks, or answering pub trivia questions, and rating your curiosity levels about the discrete tasks or even individual questions, then that is generally considered state curiosity.
Trait curiosity is part of your personality, while state curiosity is episodic (though with indeterminate time periods). Does that help?
I think curiosity is strongly related with play. Might be that the motivator behind these things are the same substrate or mechanism? I don’t know.
What I do know is that I have what you call trait curiosity. For me it feels like a drive, but it can be quite chaotic and distracting, so I have to kind of funnel it, give myself deliberate time to follow it (play) and time where I push it aside.
The latter takes a ton of energy and discipline sometimes. It’s work.
Edit: I‘m pretty sure I get a ton of value out of my curiosity though. Task at hand curiosity I guess? Not sure If I understand what you’re saying.
My goal is to understand the fundamentals of curiosity so it can be implemented in some algorithm (e.g. for Artificial General Intelligence research), probably using genetic and evolutionary algorithms. What do you consider as the most basic trait of curiosity in simple forms of live or animals? Do you you think invertebrates have curiosity? Do you think bacterias have curiosity? Probably it depends on the definition of curiosity..
By analogy, there is "Microbial intelligence" (there's even an entry on Wikipedia about this).
In machine learning programs, "curiosity" could be the initial random states that search for solution. And this initial "curiosity" (search for different possibilities and solutions) decreases as the solution is found.
I hadn't considered defining curiosity before. I looked up curiosity on wikipedia but didn't see an answer that I liked. A simple definition is that curiosity for something comes from the desire for a better mental model of that thing.
From my perspective in psychology and anthropology, evolution provides a better definition. The desire for a mental model is created mostly by the nature/nurture split in gene-culture coevolution, in which information is expensive when stored in DNA and cheap when stored in culture, hence creating a generic need for information intake, and thus a generic emotion to drive that need. "Curiosity" can then be defined as that emotion.
The circumstances which prompt that desire are determined by what "fun" is. Defining "fun" has a short and universal answer with a severe discursion into a long heuristics-and-biases approach. Judging fun requires the mind to make evaluations which are inherently difficult for System 1 to approximate, so behavior in practice very poorly approximates the short-form answer, especially as videogames explore its boundaries past what evolution is able to capably fit.
Both "curiosity" and "fun" have the problem that they are only linguistic concepts which converge as approximations to what people feel. These feelings have an unambiguous origin through evolution, which is the best way to create a description free of "common knowledge" (which relies on shared understanding to cover up vagueness). Even though the underlying definition is clear and consistent, people's usage is not so clear or consistent, and some tolerance for linguistic fuzziness is needed.
There are a few adjacent emotions which don't cleave in canonical ways, so the definition is also not canonical. I picked the emotion for mental modeling because that seems to be the origin of humans' approximate definition, and hence will best align with what people refer to in normal conversation. But you could also pick the exact concept that this emotion tries to approximate, and that would be an equally valid definition, just different. Or you could talk about information instead of modeling, but I won't.
Defining things through evolution may not be useful for laymen, because it's hard to tie evolution to behavior. But at least the definition can guide understanding even if the details are impossible to figure out. And this way, I get to sidestep your 4 questions by embedding them in the heuristics and biases that inevitably stem from an evolutionary approach.
Thank you for speaking my language. I couldn't parse through the other comments. To build on your thoughts, curiosity for me is the short-circuit ability to feel the fun chemicals just by thinking. That moment of aha connection is what I live for. I've found my curiosity just gets me that chemical high, which is why I keep doing it and keep coming back for more. My guess is in the past this chemical high led to more food and more fitness because my ancestors spent time contemplating the world around them, leading them to figure shit out. I love your point of outsourcing information connections via culture and cognition so as to not waste space epi/genetically. But I would counter that epi/genetics lacks the dimensionality required for dot connecting the universe. That z axis can only be computed in real-time and with all the sensory waveforms mixing states across neuronal circuits. To try and code that into epi/genetics seems impossible; the feedback/react time just aren't on the same timescales. You need a flywheel connection.
I think most of the time we talk about curiosity it's how we see it's evidence in others which is not the desire itself, just purely the act of spending time and focus on something not 100% necessary.
Then there's the desires behind this action which can be hugely different and vary one day to the next. I think people who focus their curiosity on a single area tend to succeed outwardly for it. But people who have broad curiosity ('trait curiosity' as you put it) have enriched and possibly happier lives for this.
Satisfying curiosity is an almost sublime experience to me. I have a pretty kinetic definition of what it means to understand (the thing that curiosity tries to achieve and is satisfied by; of course, a curious mind will find more questions than answers). Understanding something means becoming something, to an extent, so you can play with it in your head. It's like empathy for systems, or aliens / animals.
Have you ever seen videos of someone hearing for the first time in their lives, or read stories of people who develop depth perception in their mid-20s after watching 3D IMAX movies? They go through absolute bliss. They feel as if a gift had been given to them, and they can interact with the world in an entirely new way immediately afterwards; they couldn't even understand that this was a piece that's been missing.
Perhaps understanding can be thought of as a means of adding dimension to your perception field. To further map the example of gaining depth perception to understanding a concept: when one truly understands something, they can look at the world as a picture and expand it like a 3D image, then walk inside of it in their minds. When they understand more of it, the perception of the world becomes riddled with dimensions and perspectives to play with it.
Perhaps I'm /addicted/ to understanding. My job literally involves understanding firmware that other people wrote to find patterns which lead to security bugs and fix them, and I'm right in my zone every time I get to so intimately know a new piece of firmware. It's like walking through a huge castle with all of its secret corridors and the pipes behind the wall... reverse engineering eventually tells you a story about the architects as well.
I don't know if compulsion to understand is only one of the ways curiosity manifests itself or if this is something else entirely. Do you model this in your research? It feels a double-edged-sword kind of compulsion that happens to lead me out of some of my darkest moments in life (and, without proper care, thrust me right back into it). I'm aware of the causality ambiguity in this relationship, that's something I'm not completely sure about yet.
I hope this helps you with your research in some small way; my compulsion to understand is leading me to read it (and enter a dialogue through this comment).
That state versus trait distinction is really interesting. I have a very negative view of people's self-perceived traits - for many people, it seems more important to have a story to tell that makes them a unique person, than to be rational.
Presumably some perceived traits have positive effects - driving one's own behaviour with "I'm not a quitter" or whatever. But I find it fascinating that traits might not always be strongly correlated with what people actually do.
I would define curiosity as a fundamental biological (and human) need. It's what drives the mouses in Tolman's experiments to explore the labyrinth even when satiated.
It is a need because - from an evolutionary point of view - being curious increases the odds to gain useful knowledge and survive and thrive.
Therefore, curiosity, in this perspective, is the intrinsically motivated drive to gain knowledge.
Is curiosity a desire to gain knowledge?
Is it a desire to see if you are right or wrong?
Is it a drive to test existing hypotheses?
Aren't these the same thing, or at least very closely related? If you learn whether you are right or wrong, you gain knowledge (or purge ignorance) and vice versa; and testing hypotheses is how you find out if you are right or wrong.
I think the defining trait of curious people is that they understand that they are ignorant. Socrates is a great example of a curious person, he even taught by asking questions rather than providing answers, and a large part of what he seems to have wanted to teach is his method of asking questions. I certainly found myself employing that method of engaging with the world after reading Plato, and it just eroded away a lot of assumptions I had never thought to challenge. Which just raised more questions.
It's humbling discovering that things you thought you knew as truth were just notions that sound true. Like why do we value freedom in society? Beyond "it seems true to lots of people" I genuinely don't know, and it's kind of terrifying that I can't seem to find a good answer for that. Now some of you are already typing an answer to why we value freedom, do yourself a favor and repeat the question "Ok, why is that?" a couple of times and don't take "it's obvious!" for an answer and you will see what I mean.
It creates a desire to engage with the world as it is, rather than our notions of what it is. Overall curiosity is something I associate with people who are skeptics, like Michel de Montaigne or David Hume.
It requires a rare sense of detachment to go "huh, I wonder why he thinks like that when things appear quite different through my eyes?" when you hear someone say something you disagree with.
If you play a game and you lose, you can either get involved in the loss and be upset that your strategy didn't work even though it should have, or you can go "huh, I thought that would work, I wonder why not?"
I think curiosity hinges on not identifying yourself so much with your preconceived notions of the world. If we pride ourselves on how much we know, then facts that disagree with what we know threaten to unravel our self-esteem, so we push them away and refuse to consider such possibilities.
They're related, but I would say the first 2 are not the same thing.
If I want to know why rust happens, I'm curious about that effect and its mechanism.
If I think I know why rust happens, and I prove or disprove it, my goal wasn't to learn why it happens, but to prove myself right or wrong. If I'm disproven, I might not even choose to find out the real answer, but just stop.
The third thing is most closely related with the second, IMO, and I do have a hard time separating them, though there is more of a scientific bent to the last one.
curiosity: when you perceive a gap in your knowledge that has no immediate need to be resolved how much effort do you put in to filling the gap. how burning is your desire to verify all possible logical links that may exist with the only reward being that verfication.
trait vs task curiosity sounds more like the impact of other dimensions, e.g. prioritisation focus and self perception regarding productivity.
My guess is that the more productive nature of task curiosity is just the person being tested having well practiced "i dont need to worry about that" routines.
It would also be very hard to gauge the impact of wider experience.. i can be a horrendous time waster with curiosity, however i also have a wide range of random knowledge that keeps me on track in un-expected ways. e.g. remembering that i let something slide previously and it worked out ok. I actually would not be surprised to find an overlap between those perceived to have task specific curiosity and those perceived to trust the wider systems they operate within (with those perceivesd to have general curiosity less trusting of wider systems)
Maybe this could be reduced to something like "desire for novelty". But then I think that's too broad. For example, wanting the latest iPhone is a type of "desire for novelty". Would you consider someone a curious person just because they buy the latest Apple products?
Then maybe you could, instead, only consider "intellectual curiosity", where intellectual curiosity is the desire for new knowledge - descriptive knowledge, prodcedural knowledge, experiential knowledge, etc. Then I guess getting the latest iPhone is also a type of experiential knowledge, so this fails, too...
> Is curiosity a desire to gain knowledge? Is it a desire to see if you are right or wrong? Is it a drive to test existing hypotheses? Is it a motivation sparked by novelty or uncertainty?
For me it's not just the desire to solve a problem, it's the desire to know whether I've solved it in the best possible way. This requires you to explore the problem space laterally.
Curiosity is different from smarts. I would be skeptical about any essay trying to say {apples} are better than {oranges}.
If I had to pick one (and maybe you primed my response), I'd say curiosity is motivation sparked by uncertainty. I think curiosity doesn't necessarily have an end goal (gain knowledge, test a hypothesis, etc.) in mind.
>it seems to be better to have state curiosity (curiosity about the task at hand) rather than trait curiosity (as in, claiming to be a person with a high curiosity personality trait
This is very interesting, do you have any article discussing this that I could check out?
Two questions: Is there a strong relationship between agreeableness and curiosity? Any data on trait curiosity for elite scientists or inventors (e.g. Nobel laurates) compared to not-quite-so-elite scientists with similar IQ range?
I would have a bit of a hard time to recommend some citations without narrowing the interest a bit. There are quite a lot of great papers. Kind of the granddaddy of modern curiosity research is:
I am really sorry. I do not know if there is an open access version of this paper.
If you start from there and then find work that cites that, you will be able to find most modern curiosity research, I would wager. Not everyone agrees with what followed from this, but pretty much everyone has to contend with it in one way or another. I would claim that there is not really a consensus, but "knowledge gap" (or "information gap") and "uncertainty" are probably the most prominent and influential keywords.
***
Okay, I did a bit more digging in my file system and found a reasonably recent overview by two fairly prominent researchers that might serve as a decent starting point. While I don't agree with everything here, that hardly matters of course. It's a place to start.
I think it is open access. It is for me in firefox with no javascript enabled, anyway.
Dunno for sure. I think that they can. The anticorrelation is rather small, after all. So some people with high trait will occasionally have high state curiosity, of course.
I suspect that some people really like to think of themselves as curious such that feeling that way is a part of their identity. They consider themselves to be generally curious about everything. However, there are almost an infinite number of things you could be curious about. It seems unlikely that even a high trait curiosity person is really curious about everything.
If I construct several curiosity experiments with tasks asking about 1) math and logic problems, 2) fashion in late 15th Century Venice, 3) the mating habits of honeybees, and 4) political conflicts in the Han Dynasty, how many self-reported high curiosity people do you expect would rate all of those tasks with high degrees of curiosity? I suspect not all or even many.
Still, I don't think this means that high trait curiosity doesn't exist [edit: s/exists/doesn't exist/]. I just think it's not a good predictor of curiosity in the task or specific performance, among other things.
> You mention that trait curiosity doesn't give you anything, but does state curiosity?
I shouldn't say that trait curiosity doesn't get you anything. It may correlate with some benefits, though it is not clear to me that trait curiosity research has sufficiently proven that trait curiosity gets you more than higher intelligence does. From my reading, pretty much all of the benefits claimed by trait curiosity are just the benefits of being smarter, so I'm not really convinced there is anything there.
With that said: yes, I would say that in my research and my general sense, there is a noticeable effect size between state curiosity and performance. This includes being objectively correct in problem solving, ability to recall over time (better memory), better memory accuracy, etc.
> Could choosing to work in a field that one considers more interesting lead to more state curiosity when doing that work?
I think this is probably true. Certainly there are proposed links between interest and curiosity in the literature. Some, I would say, argue there is no difference, though I think there probably still is some difference. I am interested in certain type of art, for example, while at the same time not being curious about how it's made or anything else about it apart from wanting to look at it.
Believing what I believe, if I wanted to perform better and be more stimulated by my work, I would certainly focus on interest and curiosity. But I am biased, because I work on curiosity itself. I am literally curious about the thing that makes me curious about itself. :)
If your goal is fame or money or power, then following your interests and curiosity might not get you there, of course.
> Trait curiosity gets you almost nothing: no better learning outcomes, no better performance, and no better recall (in complex problem solving anyway; results are sometimes different in trivial pursuits
May it be, that positive outcomes of curiosity as a trait are beyond what you are measuring? For example, I learned a lot about how organizations work, because I was curious often why some organization failed to do something, or how it managed to do something where other failed. I had no idea at first what it means to go to Moon from organizational point of view, but when some managed to do it while other failed, I became curious. This curiosity led me to learn a lot about management on many examples, and often I found something to think about when I least expected it. Like I read some random news article and it mentioned some difficulties which organization faced. And my curiosity at first was not directed at management, though with time the direction shifted, now I curious how organizations work even when it have nothing to do with Moon.
When you have a lot of unanswered questions in your head, then almost everything counts for something to one of these questions.
> I don't believe there is a way to boost your state (task) curiosity. I'd also be skeptical that you can boost your trait curiosity.
Operant conditioning? Eat a cookie every time you've found a curios question, googled it and found an answer. Wouldn't it work? I believe it would boost the trait. I'm not sure about the state curiosity.
> I would genuinely be interested in knowing what you, dear reader, think curiosity really is.
I think, that we need first to separate curiosity as a behavior and curiosity as a trait of mind. As a behavior curiosity is anything from your list: desire to gain knowledge, or to see if you are right or wrong, or testing existing hypotheses, and so on.
Curiosity as a mind trait is an urge to pull a dangling thread. When you see a question without a clear answer, you feel desire to answer it. Some people do not see questions, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are not curious, their curiosity is just triggered less often. Some people see questions, but do not behave as curious, either because they are not curious enough (they lack curiosity), or they invent some answer that doesn't really answer anything (like "why this happened"? "because of magic"). These magic answers, I believe, is the result of untrained curiosity. People feel urge to answer question, but they cannot find a way to use their urge for constructive purposes, so they do something to stop their urge bothering them.
I would tend to label this as personality trait curiosity, though not with absolute certainty. It's kind of a classical example of trait curiosity. "Oh, my child is always asking questions about everything -- what a naturally curious kid."
On the other hand, if someone is always wrecking specific electronic devices you own because they want to know exactly how that works, but they never want to figure out how to make you a better tasting dinner, that might be state curiosity? :)
I think I found something else better than being smart: a high need for cognition. Possibly better than curiosity, but read below to find the nuance I find in that.
I think I'm a little smart, but not too much higher-than-average. But because I constantly need to think about everything, I'm always exercising my brain, and working on problems that everyone else ignores half their day. I've known plenty of people way smarter than me that didn't achieve as much, because they just wanted to turn off and tune out. Drink some beer. Watch some mindless movies.
I'm going 24x7. So like the multi-billionaire CEO who's only in that position because he works 80hr/wk and never turns it off... I'm doing well in tech (and my hobbies!) because I just can't stop thinking about algorithms and solving problems. My hobbies and entertainment end up being highly-technical intensive thought-requiring activities.
Curiosity is also a trait I've got, but I suspect it's just a result of the high need for cognition. I find that I'm not that curious about things that don't make me think a lot.
I haven't been to hospital bed but I've also noticed that even fun and interesting things can burn you off. I have to consciously force myself to focus on things that give rest to my brain - playing Rocket League with my son, going for a walk without my phone, reading novels.
I am very interested to hear what kinds of health conditions arose from constantly working (both as a case study and as a thing I can do to avoid myself)
I met my first cofounder talking to them over beers. I met my fiancee over a shared love of mindless movies. I've mostly worked about 40 hours a week through my career so far. Now I'm in my mid-40s and I have what I believe to be my ideal job, I'm paid very well for it, and I have lots of time to play video games.
Your path suits you and you find it satisfying, and I'm happy for you, but it's quite unkind to dismiss other people's choices to drink beer and watch movies instead of working. There are many paths to happiness besides your own.
cognition junkie. i feel a similar way about how i'm "hardwired". i have a reserved, yet intense curiosity, something i discovered through my courses in uni. once i found something that peaked my curiosity, i finally found confidence in myself. previously, in other schooling settings, despite high-marks, i never felt intelligent or like i was even learning anything.
tangentially, i have a friend who is a musician that was never "traditionally" smart. i suppose he was just never interested in any of the material, so he never really gave much of an effort. once he found music and discovered that he could orchestrate things on his computer, he fell into a rabbithole that he'll never come out of. learning really is all about engagement, something which sounds so obviously trite but so rarely ever implemented in early american education, at least in my experience.
> I've known plenty of people way smarter than me that didn't achieve as much, because they just wanted to turn off and tune out. Drink some beer. Watch some mindless movies.
Cognition can be painful in a psyche impacted by a history of high stress. Read about substance P neurotransmitters and depression; chemical messages for physical pain are high in depressed patients, and yet there's nothing to indicate that there should be pain. Block the substance P neurotransmitters and you get an antidepressant.
So, I think there are repressive forces in addition to what you're describing above. Modeling the problem this way, it's easier to be optimistic and figure out societal machinery to promote more problem solving by addressing forces like stress; instead of TV watching and etc., since these habits are side-effects of other problems.
Thanks, this explains a lot for me. I love thinking about things and learning things, but doing it too much is just exhausting. I still have hobbies that are technical, but the parent poster's description sounds like a recipe for burnout for me.
Through meditation, I've come to see that my own habit of thinking 24/7 was actually a means of escape for me. A way of numbing feelings and avoiding silence. In the years since I started to practice meditation my mind has become a lot more quiet and I no longer think about work things obsessively, I can switch off much more easily and conversely it's made me a lot better at knowing what is and isn't important to work on.
I do envy the people who seem to be able to stay on 24/7 without burning out, but part of me also wonders if there's still a limit to that and perhaps my limit is lower.
For me, I think the traits that drive my success, in order, are curiosity, tenacity and intelligence. People always tell me I'm smart, and I know for sure my intelligence is above average, but I meet so many people who are far smarter than me. On the curiosity scale though, as a man in my mid-30s, I still annoy the hell out of everyone around me with curious questions about everything. I have to moderate myself to keep from asking as many questions as a curious 6 year old. And I'd attribute a significant of my success in my programming career to my refusal to give up when I have to spend days troubleshooting, figuring our how to make undocumented code work, or nag people to get the access I need to certain systems.
My biggest generic life advice for people is "Cultivate curiosity".
The first thing I ask about when people want to know if they should get into programming is how tenacious they are.
I was the same. But constantly thinking at high cognition caused me stress. My brain needs more downtime. Now I always prioritize what I focus on and think about. This selective turn off has made me happier and de-stressed.
> So like the multi-billionaire CEO who's only in that position because he works 80hr/wk and never turns it off...
I do not believe this narrative that is only confirmed by billionaires themselves. They mostly rely on the work in others for their success, why working more hours would even have an impact?
Depends on what you define as work, or rather the difficulty and quality of it per hour.
Example: An accountant who works 8h/d does very taxing, mental work. They require high concentration and precision, it’s often quite boring stuff, but still, they have to get things right, quickly, constantly.
A manager or director might effectively work more hours, but those hours typically have a much more natural rhythm to them. The vast majority of it is communication or preparing for such. The hard part is making the right decisions, listening learning (broad sense), but it’s not detailed and constant.
We programmers tend to complain when we have too many meetings and purely conceptual/communicative work, because it doesn’t „feel“ like work and getting things done, right? There’s a hint there.
For me, 3-4h of highly concentrated programming and testing is much more taxing than a full day of communication/learning. Much more.
I was reading an interesting article about investment banking recently, it was quite clear that the further up the greasy pole bankers climb the less hours they work. The people at the top were only doing half the hours of those entering the profession.
They work to stay on top of the pile. Working for impact, or for the business or customers is a career limiting decision several levels below CEO with a few exceptions, usually original founders. Everyone else gets filtered out.
What about the effects of 'time spent on the problem' (ie compounding)? If you are only learning for learning sake, then getting to a "101" or "102" or "103" (to use American college level terminology)is fine I would assume. This might take 1-3 years of learning/study/doing.
But if you truly want to "master" something - then does "constantly thinking about problems" mean you will never benefit from the same 'compounding' effect as someone who has spent 3/5/10 years of their time on that problem?
Or - is all your "need for cognition" - mostly in one domain space (e.g. "Computer Science" or "database structure" etc)?
This is Agnes de Mille conversing with the great dancer Martha Graham:
> “But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”
> “No artist is pleased.”
> “But then there is no satisfaction?”
> “No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
This is very interesting....
A friend and I have been back and forthing in a jocular way with various permutations of pop psychology type quizzes that we all see online or where ever...
example:
what would you rather be...
A) smart
B) lucky
C) wise
D) rich
E) in love
etc etc.
you get the idea. Just goofing.
we did not think to include curious, which, dang, is a good one. But the list gets long after a while.
Also, I have had this discussion with my Dad, who is 93, and he always tells me how smart I am, of course he is my Dad, but I always tell him how wise he is and how much I want him to share his wisdom with me.
I suppose, most likely, the answer has something to do with where you are in life, but me, being 64, and my Dad being 93, I long for his wisdom. But, then I have nephews, in their 20's who wish for the wealth I have.
It's interesting. I wish I had some wisdom, or truth for you. Sorry. Just observations.
I feel that wisdom is a very overlooked trait. Especially in the younger generations it is associated with being "boring", which is a shame. I think not that many people care about being smart, and even less care about being wise.
I am 27 and I often think about how to develop more wisdom for life, but it's difficult to find some good resources for it. A collection of wise quotes doesn't go really far in my opinion. The best thing I have found is just lots of introspection and reading books which have stood the test of time. But I wish there was a more straightforward way.
Every situation requires balancing curiosity and caution, knowledge and exploration, etc. You may be "curious" but you may have a strong fear of failure that prevents you from actually experimenting when you genuinely don't know the likely outcome. Sometimes that keeps you back from important growth, other times it keeps you from blowing your head off.
It's also amazing that in the world we live in currently, you can do very well by just not fucking up. EG: someone born in the 80s could just follow "best practices" their whole life so far and be fine - eg: get good grades, study a valuable major, don't eat garbage, don't marry crazy people/idiots, stay off dangerous drugs, and mainly show up to work, be clean and nice - and you can by now be a very successful 40 year old without really having had to innovate or take huge risks. It's amazing.
i thought about Unit 731 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731), there probably were alot of curious individuals guided by fcked up morals. There's a lot going into acquiring knowledge besides simply considering the researcher's intent, subject's feeling are an important thing to consider.
In a European country, think Spain, Italy, France, "get good grades, study a valuable major, don't eat garbage, don't marry crazy people/idiots, stay off dangerous drugs, and mainly show up to work, be clean and nice" and you are likely to end up with job paying 40 to 80k (before taxes) a year, which is not bad, but I consider that money far from financially making someone "a very successful 40-year-old".
With my STEM major and a PhD, I would have made between 40 and 50k per year before taxes.
There are places in those and similar countries where that sort of income will let you own a house and car, raise a family and pets, even fit in a fairly cost-intensive hobby such as sailing/horseriding/cars/light aircraft if you don't go crazy. It's genuinely a slightly confusing situation to be in, compared to reading about Google employees making half a million a year - are you living a great life, or falling behind the modern world?
As a person living in a (relatively for the western world) low-cost-of-living area, making a decent income for a low-cost-of-living area, it sometimes feels like a local maximum. It would take a sizeable income jump to offset low cost of housing. No doubt the top world cities are the place to be, in terms of all kinds of fun and opportunities, but lifestyle would be worse there unless or until you'd broken into a really high income bracket.
Honestly, being smart is overrated. Granted, it's better than being dumb, but being hard working, having social skills, being at the right time at the right place, having grit, having a head start in life (money, status, etc), looking attractive, having stamina, having an upbeat personality, all offer often as good or better deals and/or less downsides.
Smart is like a spice, it's great to add to something good to make it better. But it can't be the main thing.
You want to have a good enough mix but I would say, scoring high on any 3 of those should give nice results.
People boast about need to be hard working, having grit or how easy everything comes for attractive people.
Then there is a lot of people who focus on their strengths too much. Like if one is attractive already focusing on improving that will not bring much more to his life. Improving on hard working while being attractive that is going to bring some serious results. Improving on social skills while being hard working the same.
Just mix up some third trait and see how much one can achieve.
Of course one cannot work on "being at the right time at the right place" directly - but other traits if worked on can bring opportunities so like having better social skills can open some doors or make new friends that will have different connections.
I would even say that having 2 of those traits high can bring "being in the right time at the right place" into reality.
I agree. I see being smart as the ability to learn some things quickly. However, you have to apply this in the right way and that's why other character traits are important - such as wisdom, kindness, patience. If being "smart" is someone's main personality trait, I think they might miss out on the bigger picture.
Along with curiosity—which I agree is probably one of the most underrated adult traits in terms of the ability to learn new things—is cultivating the imagination.
Thinking up wild and vivid scenarios in your mind and playing around with ideas and experimenting with concepts is how I've gotten through most of the traditionally difficult subjects I've encountered so far.
The author's writing style rubs me the wrong way. His other post ("Why Obsessively Following Successful People Online is Dangerous") and this one share a weird style in which the author feigns self-deprecation only to follow it with "but I've figured it all out and here are 3-5 bullet points that you should follow!"
Examples:
> A lot of people say to me: “Ivaylo! You are so smart. Your newsletter is full of insights. The books you summarize are so elegantly presented with so much attention and care. Your parents must be proud!” To this, I always respond: “Thanks! I was simply born amazingly gifted.” And then I wake up. I’m kidding, of course. To be honest. I consider myself pretty ordinary in terms of smartness. Actually, the word I’m looking for is average. But there is one quality that helps me fight through my natural stupidity – my unfair advantage sort to say – I’m curious.
> So what’s the problem? It’s this: We spend more time consuming content instead of using the content we consume. And I’m not simply saying this because I think that I’m an omnipotent idol that knows everything. I’m saying this because I feel this way all the time myself. I get lost in the consuming stage – drowning in The Ambitions River – more often than I care to admit.
Readit News
This article reads like un-researched folk psychology rather than science, which is fine I guess, but I would take it all with skepticism.
I'll note that based on my and others' research, it seems to be better to have state curiosity (curiosity about the task at hand) rather than trait curiosity (as in, claiming to be a person with a high curiosity personality trait). Trait curiosity gets you almost nothing: no better learning outcomes, no better performance, and no better recall (in complex problem solving anyway; results are sometimes different in trivial pursuits, but who cares about that [edit: I shouldn't say it that way. I was being glib. From a scientific knowledge standpoint, of course we are curious about how curiosity works in trivial matters!]).
I don't believe there is a way to boost your state (task) curiosity. I'd also be skeptical that you can boost your trait curiosity.
Anyway, one of the main problems with curiosity research is the difficulty in even defining curiosity to a high degree of consensus. I would suggest that as you read this thread, you will see various meanings.
Is curiosity a desire to gain knowledge? Is it a desire to see if you are right or wrong? Is it a drive to test existing hypotheses? Is it a motivation sparked by novelty or uncertainty?
I would genuinely be interested in knowing what you, dear reader, think curiosity really is. :)
So question, what sort of overlap do you see between trait curiosity and state curiosity, and if trait curiosity doesn't get you those things, is the implication that state curiosity does?
Where does retrospection lie with regard to curiosity?
I read the explanation on Wikipedia[1] and am honestly less clear, as their example gives me the impression of trait curiosity. I like to dig into what I'm doing to really understand what makes it tick, I hate memorizing things and desire to know why things are the way they are, not just that they are, is that an example of state curiosity?
To answer your question, I would say curiosity is all those things. If I understand these two types correctly and I was trying to define them as narrowly as possible, I'd say that state curiosity is a desire to understand patterns and their significance, whereas trait curiosity is the desire for more novel information and experiences.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity#State_and_trait_curi...
In fact, in many of our experiments, trait curiosity is a moderately good inverse predictor of state curiosity (negative correlation). In other words, if you rate yourself as a generally highly curious person, then we can slightly predict that you will not be curious about the task at hand. This slight anticorrelation is unusual! I think that some people like to see themselves as generally curious, but maybe not many people really are? Dunno for sure, though.
> if trait curiosity doesn't get you those things, is the implication that state curiosity does?
Yes. State curiosity, or rating high curiosity about the task at hand, gets better results in complex problem solving. There might be some sort of affinity effect. If you like complex problems, then you're more curious about complex problems, and therefore tend to do better at them. Maybe? Makes some sense.
Causation is difficult to show. Are you curious because you are good at it and want to know if you're right? Are you good at it because your curiosity has led you practice and learn how to solve these problems? Still, the effect is consistently there.
> Where does retrospection lie with regard to curiosity?
Probably depends on what you mean. Curiosity can be both relatively fleeting and quite long lasting given differing circumstances, so I'm not sure I can say much without clarification.
> is that an example of state curiosity?
First, I'd say that wiki stub about state/trait is lacking. I can see why you'd be confused. I do not recall reading a great "here's what state/trait are", just more like reading 1000s of papers. The research on the personality trait of curiosity and the state of being task-oriented curious perhaps surprisingly do not overlap very much. Your example could be an example of either trait or state. If generally you like to know how things work, then that might indeed be an example of trait curiosity. When you want to know how this $widget right in front of you works, and you spend time taking it apart and reassembling it until you are satisfied, then that might be an example of state curiosity. And so you can be one without the other. You can want to know how things work, without really bothering to investigate. Or you can not want to know how everything works, but really want to know how this one $widget works. Or both. There's nothing that says you cannot be both. The anticorrelation is 1) weak, and 2) not necessarily causal.
I think trait curiosity works similarly with other traits that people can fall into the trap of ascribing to themselves. For example, telling others that you are hard working, never giving up, always being there for people or whatever. Once you start repeating to yourself and to others such statements you can in a sense 'lock yourself' into it. You get into situation where you start thinking 'well, a curious person in this situation should do this, I better do it or else I'm not curious'. I think this is the difference in outcome in trivial pursuits as you say.
On the other hand it's very difficult to be curious about something you really know nothing or very little about. It really makes little sense to be curious about cryptography or quantum computing if you struggled with high school algebra and never made any serious effort to improve your skills and understanding.
Of course none of this is to claim that there is no such thing as pursuing knowledge or ideas without seemingly any external motivation. The way it looks from the inside I think is usually you have to have some idea of what you're doing and you want to see if you can apply this to something else. Counterintuitively, here you're trying to see if something that should be considered different is in fact some slight modification of what you already know. So it's usually not "let's learn something completely new because I like to learn things and am curious" but "let's see if I can reformulate this thing that looks unknown to something that I know". This is the creative part where you are actually learning. The process of reformulating or restating something with a language that you understand and you've built for yourself, bringing in the new idea, often not explicitly stated to be connected with what you know, is what gives you the kick.
Using that metaphor, curiosity to me is the desire to expand small bubbles on the perimeter of the bubble of my knowledge. It may manifest in all the ways you mentioned. Why is this I’m doing not working? Or simply wondering “why can’t lions purr?” and expanding my bubble that tiny amount for no practical reason but to do so.
For me it's mostly defining the undefined. I don't do it for the sake of gaining knowledge, it's more like "oh, so that's how it works". I like the feeling of taking something that feels like a magical black box and systematically breaking it down to the point where it doesn't feel magical anymore. Often times you only need a little bit more than a surface level understanding to get to this point.
This is also a good working definition of “engineering”.
Vladimir Nabokov
It would be odd to describe it as an emotional motivation and not a behaviour.
I'd say the behaviour is a pursuit of not immediately necessary information. The subject is drawn to unravel unknowns in their environment. It might be broadly focussed to flip every stone or narrow to a subject e.g. people or a topic.
The various motivations for this behaviour probably encompasses all human motivations. It might be delight/entertainment/play of discovery, collector/completionist type obsession, fear/anxiety/pessimism/paranoia of unknowns, ego preservation to be the "one who knows", procrastination in the face of aversive tasks...
On the contrary, I can certainly imagine (from experience :-) ) being curious about something but too lazy to actually find out. Just like someone can be hungry but too lazy to go out and get food, but they're still hungry (I'm not sure whether such a person could be described as "greedy" though). I think that all confirms the parent comment's point that some forms of curiosity don't lead to better outcomes.
By self-learning, I want a person who digs beyond the surface and understands communication is fundamentally flawed as people are flawed. People do not communicate clearly. Sometimes on purpose. A "curious" person in my mind is comfortable with the confusion and actively tries to clear up the confusion and digs deep to truly understand what is really be asked, what is being said or not said.
Trait curiosity is generally thought of as people who exhibit a broad desire to learn, to be open to new experiences, and to be creative, for example. If you like reading books on a wide variety of topics, or studying a range of fields in school or personal life, then you might have a curious personality trait. In this case, it is generally thought that you will rate certain questions on the Big Five Index [BFI] or the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory ver. 2 [CEI-II] more highly than others. I do not research trait curiosity. I collect data on it, but it's not that useful to me, really.
Instead, I do computational modelling of human behavior using performance on discrete tasks and ratings about those tasks, which is more like state curiosity. If you are solving puzzles, or answering math/logic problems, or recalling difficult memory tasks, or answering pub trivia questions, and rating your curiosity levels about the discrete tasks or even individual questions, then that is generally considered state curiosity.
Trait curiosity is part of your personality, while state curiosity is episodic (though with indeterminate time periods). Does that help?
What I do know is that I have what you call trait curiosity. For me it feels like a drive, but it can be quite chaotic and distracting, so I have to kind of funnel it, give myself deliberate time to follow it (play) and time where I push it aside.
The latter takes a ton of energy and discipline sometimes. It’s work.
Edit: I‘m pretty sure I get a ton of value out of my curiosity though. Task at hand curiosity I guess? Not sure If I understand what you’re saying.
From my perspective in psychology and anthropology, evolution provides a better definition. The desire for a mental model is created mostly by the nature/nurture split in gene-culture coevolution, in which information is expensive when stored in DNA and cheap when stored in culture, hence creating a generic need for information intake, and thus a generic emotion to drive that need. "Curiosity" can then be defined as that emotion.
The circumstances which prompt that desire are determined by what "fun" is. Defining "fun" has a short and universal answer with a severe discursion into a long heuristics-and-biases approach. Judging fun requires the mind to make evaluations which are inherently difficult for System 1 to approximate, so behavior in practice very poorly approximates the short-form answer, especially as videogames explore its boundaries past what evolution is able to capably fit.
Both "curiosity" and "fun" have the problem that they are only linguistic concepts which converge as approximations to what people feel. These feelings have an unambiguous origin through evolution, which is the best way to create a description free of "common knowledge" (which relies on shared understanding to cover up vagueness). Even though the underlying definition is clear and consistent, people's usage is not so clear or consistent, and some tolerance for linguistic fuzziness is needed.
There are a few adjacent emotions which don't cleave in canonical ways, so the definition is also not canonical. I picked the emotion for mental modeling because that seems to be the origin of humans' approximate definition, and hence will best align with what people refer to in normal conversation. But you could also pick the exact concept that this emotion tries to approximate, and that would be an equally valid definition, just different. Or you could talk about information instead of modeling, but I won't.
Defining things through evolution may not be useful for laymen, because it's hard to tie evolution to behavior. But at least the definition can guide understanding even if the details are impossible to figure out. And this way, I get to sidestep your 4 questions by embedding them in the heuristics and biases that inevitably stem from an evolutionary approach.
Then there's the desires behind this action which can be hugely different and vary one day to the next. I think people who focus their curiosity on a single area tend to succeed outwardly for it. But people who have broad curiosity ('trait curiosity' as you put it) have enriched and possibly happier lives for this.
Have you ever seen videos of someone hearing for the first time in their lives, or read stories of people who develop depth perception in their mid-20s after watching 3D IMAX movies? They go through absolute bliss. They feel as if a gift had been given to them, and they can interact with the world in an entirely new way immediately afterwards; they couldn't even understand that this was a piece that's been missing.
Perhaps understanding can be thought of as a means of adding dimension to your perception field. To further map the example of gaining depth perception to understanding a concept: when one truly understands something, they can look at the world as a picture and expand it like a 3D image, then walk inside of it in their minds. When they understand more of it, the perception of the world becomes riddled with dimensions and perspectives to play with it.
Perhaps I'm /addicted/ to understanding. My job literally involves understanding firmware that other people wrote to find patterns which lead to security bugs and fix them, and I'm right in my zone every time I get to so intimately know a new piece of firmware. It's like walking through a huge castle with all of its secret corridors and the pipes behind the wall... reverse engineering eventually tells you a story about the architects as well.
I don't know if compulsion to understand is only one of the ways curiosity manifests itself or if this is something else entirely. Do you model this in your research? It feels a double-edged-sword kind of compulsion that happens to lead me out of some of my darkest moments in life (and, without proper care, thrust me right back into it). I'm aware of the causality ambiguity in this relationship, that's something I'm not completely sure about yet.
I hope this helps you with your research in some small way; my compulsion to understand is leading me to read it (and enter a dialogue through this comment).
Presumably some perceived traits have positive effects - driving one's own behaviour with "I'm not a quitter" or whatever. But I find it fascinating that traits might not always be strongly correlated with what people actually do.
I think the defining trait of curious people is that they understand that they are ignorant. Socrates is a great example of a curious person, he even taught by asking questions rather than providing answers, and a large part of what he seems to have wanted to teach is his method of asking questions. I certainly found myself employing that method of engaging with the world after reading Plato, and it just eroded away a lot of assumptions I had never thought to challenge. Which just raised more questions.
It's humbling discovering that things you thought you knew as truth were just notions that sound true. Like why do we value freedom in society? Beyond "it seems true to lots of people" I genuinely don't know, and it's kind of terrifying that I can't seem to find a good answer for that. Now some of you are already typing an answer to why we value freedom, do yourself a favor and repeat the question "Ok, why is that?" a couple of times and don't take "it's obvious!" for an answer and you will see what I mean.
It creates a desire to engage with the world as it is, rather than our notions of what it is. Overall curiosity is something I associate with people who are skeptics, like Michel de Montaigne or David Hume.
It requires a rare sense of detachment to go "huh, I wonder why he thinks like that when things appear quite different through my eyes?" when you hear someone say something you disagree with.
If you play a game and you lose, you can either get involved in the loss and be upset that your strategy didn't work even though it should have, or you can go "huh, I thought that would work, I wonder why not?"
I think curiosity hinges on not identifying yourself so much with your preconceived notions of the world. If we pride ourselves on how much we know, then facts that disagree with what we know threaten to unravel our self-esteem, so we push them away and refuse to consider such possibilities.
If I want to know why rust happens, I'm curious about that effect and its mechanism.
If I think I know why rust happens, and I prove or disprove it, my goal wasn't to learn why it happens, but to prove myself right or wrong. If I'm disproven, I might not even choose to find out the real answer, but just stop.
The third thing is most closely related with the second, IMO, and I do have a hard time separating them, though there is more of a scientific bent to the last one.
curiosity: when you perceive a gap in your knowledge that has no immediate need to be resolved how much effort do you put in to filling the gap. how burning is your desire to verify all possible logical links that may exist with the only reward being that verfication.
trait vs task curiosity sounds more like the impact of other dimensions, e.g. prioritisation focus and self perception regarding productivity.
My guess is that the more productive nature of task curiosity is just the person being tested having well practiced "i dont need to worry about that" routines.
It would also be very hard to gauge the impact of wider experience.. i can be a horrendous time waster with curiosity, however i also have a wide range of random knowledge that keeps me on track in un-expected ways. e.g. remembering that i let something slide previously and it worked out ok. I actually would not be surprised to find an overlap between those perceived to have task specific curiosity and those perceived to trust the wider systems they operate within (with those perceivesd to have general curiosity less trusting of wider systems)
Once you’ve figured that out, you move on to other things, but the idea is the same.
Maybe this could be reduced to something like "desire for novelty". But then I think that's too broad. For example, wanting the latest iPhone is a type of "desire for novelty". Would you consider someone a curious person just because they buy the latest Apple products?
Then maybe you could, instead, only consider "intellectual curiosity", where intellectual curiosity is the desire for new knowledge - descriptive knowledge, prodcedural knowledge, experiential knowledge, etc. Then I guess getting the latest iPhone is also a type of experiential knowledge, so this fails, too...
For me it's not just the desire to solve a problem, it's the desire to know whether I've solved it in the best possible way. This requires you to explore the problem space laterally.
Curiosity is different from smarts. I would be skeptical about any essay trying to say {apples} are better than {oranges}.
If I had to pick one (and maybe you primed my response), I'd say curiosity is motivation sparked by uncertainty. I think curiosity doesn't necessarily have an end goal (gain knowledge, test a hypothesis, etc.) in mind.
Personally I think wise > smart.
Maybe the difference is that being smart means that you know how to apply knowledge and being wise means when to apply knowledge.
And maybe wisdom is about a desire to learn and being smart about a desire to know.
This is very interesting, do you have any article discussing this that I could check out?
Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75–98. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.75
I am really sorry. I do not know if there is an open access version of this paper.
If you start from there and then find work that cites that, you will be able to find most modern curiosity research, I would wager. Not everyone agrees with what followed from this, but pretty much everyone has to contend with it in one way or another. I would claim that there is not really a consensus, but "knowledge gap" (or "information gap") and "uncertainty" are probably the most prominent and influential keywords.
***
Okay, I did a bit more digging in my file system and found a reasonably recent overview by two fairly prominent researchers that might serve as a decent starting point. While I don't agree with everything here, that hardly matters of course. It's a place to start.
I think it is open access. It is for me in firefox with no javascript enabled, anyway.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4635443/
and seems to be available directly from one of the authors, if nothing else:
http://www.celestekidd.com/papers/KiddHayden2015.pdf
I suspect that some people really like to think of themselves as curious such that feeling that way is a part of their identity. They consider themselves to be generally curious about everything. However, there are almost an infinite number of things you could be curious about. It seems unlikely that even a high trait curiosity person is really curious about everything.
If I construct several curiosity experiments with tasks asking about 1) math and logic problems, 2) fashion in late 15th Century Venice, 3) the mating habits of honeybees, and 4) political conflicts in the Han Dynasty, how many self-reported high curiosity people do you expect would rate all of those tasks with high degrees of curiosity? I suspect not all or even many.
Still, I don't think this means that high trait curiosity doesn't exist [edit: s/exists/doesn't exist/]. I just think it's not a good predictor of curiosity in the task or specific performance, among other things.
Could choosing to work in a field that one considers more interesting lead to more state curiosity when doing that work?
I shouldn't say that trait curiosity doesn't get you anything. It may correlate with some benefits, though it is not clear to me that trait curiosity research has sufficiently proven that trait curiosity gets you more than higher intelligence does. From my reading, pretty much all of the benefits claimed by trait curiosity are just the benefits of being smarter, so I'm not really convinced there is anything there.
With that said: yes, I would say that in my research and my general sense, there is a noticeable effect size between state curiosity and performance. This includes being objectively correct in problem solving, ability to recall over time (better memory), better memory accuracy, etc.
> Could choosing to work in a field that one considers more interesting lead to more state curiosity when doing that work?
I think this is probably true. Certainly there are proposed links between interest and curiosity in the literature. Some, I would say, argue there is no difference, though I think there probably still is some difference. I am interested in certain type of art, for example, while at the same time not being curious about how it's made or anything else about it apart from wanting to look at it.
Believing what I believe, if I wanted to perform better and be more stimulated by my work, I would certainly focus on interest and curiosity. But I am biased, because I work on curiosity itself. I am literally curious about the thing that makes me curious about itself. :)
If your goal is fame or money or power, then following your interests and curiosity might not get you there, of course.
May it be, that positive outcomes of curiosity as a trait are beyond what you are measuring? For example, I learned a lot about how organizations work, because I was curious often why some organization failed to do something, or how it managed to do something where other failed. I had no idea at first what it means to go to Moon from organizational point of view, but when some managed to do it while other failed, I became curious. This curiosity led me to learn a lot about management on many examples, and often I found something to think about when I least expected it. Like I read some random news article and it mentioned some difficulties which organization faced. And my curiosity at first was not directed at management, though with time the direction shifted, now I curious how organizations work even when it have nothing to do with Moon.
When you have a lot of unanswered questions in your head, then almost everything counts for something to one of these questions.
> I don't believe there is a way to boost your state (task) curiosity. I'd also be skeptical that you can boost your trait curiosity.
Operant conditioning? Eat a cookie every time you've found a curios question, googled it and found an answer. Wouldn't it work? I believe it would boost the trait. I'm not sure about the state curiosity.
> I would genuinely be interested in knowing what you, dear reader, think curiosity really is.
I think, that we need first to separate curiosity as a behavior and curiosity as a trait of mind. As a behavior curiosity is anything from your list: desire to gain knowledge, or to see if you are right or wrong, or testing existing hypotheses, and so on.
Curiosity as a mind trait is an urge to pull a dangling thread. When you see a question without a clear answer, you feel desire to answer it. Some people do not see questions, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are not curious, their curiosity is just triggered less often. Some people see questions, but do not behave as curious, either because they are not curious enough (they lack curiosity), or they invent some answer that doesn't really answer anything (like "why this happened"? "because of magic"). These magic answers, I believe, is the result of untrained curiosity. People feel urge to answer question, but they cannot find a way to use their urge for constructive purposes, so they do something to stop their urge bothering them.
On the other hand, if someone is always wrecking specific electronic devices you own because they want to know exactly how that works, but they never want to figure out how to make you a better tasting dinner, that might be state curiosity? :)
The lines are perhaps not super clear, though.
I think I'm a little smart, but not too much higher-than-average. But because I constantly need to think about everything, I'm always exercising my brain, and working on problems that everyone else ignores half their day. I've known plenty of people way smarter than me that didn't achieve as much, because they just wanted to turn off and tune out. Drink some beer. Watch some mindless movies.
I'm going 24x7. So like the multi-billionaire CEO who's only in that position because he works 80hr/wk and never turns it off... I'm doing well in tech (and my hobbies!) because I just can't stop thinking about algorithms and solving problems. My hobbies and entertainment end up being highly-technical intensive thought-requiring activities.
Curiosity is also a trait I've got, but I suspect it's just a result of the high need for cognition. I find that I'm not that curious about things that don't make me think a lot.
My family shifted my priorities. Getting out of my own head to spend my time with them is more important.
I miss the obsessive all nighters sometimes, but the trade off is worth it.
Your path suits you and you find it satisfying, and I'm happy for you, but it's quite unkind to dismiss other people's choices to drink beer and watch movies instead of working. There are many paths to happiness besides your own.
tangentially, i have a friend who is a musician that was never "traditionally" smart. i suppose he was just never interested in any of the material, so he never really gave much of an effort. once he found music and discovered that he could orchestrate things on his computer, he fell into a rabbithole that he'll never come out of. learning really is all about engagement, something which sounds so obviously trite but so rarely ever implemented in early american education, at least in my experience.
Cognition can be painful in a psyche impacted by a history of high stress. Read about substance P neurotransmitters and depression; chemical messages for physical pain are high in depressed patients, and yet there's nothing to indicate that there should be pain. Block the substance P neurotransmitters and you get an antidepressant.
So, I think there are repressive forces in addition to what you're describing above. Modeling the problem this way, it's easier to be optimistic and figure out societal machinery to promote more problem solving by addressing forces like stress; instead of TV watching and etc., since these habits are side-effects of other problems.
Through meditation, I've come to see that my own habit of thinking 24/7 was actually a means of escape for me. A way of numbing feelings and avoiding silence. In the years since I started to practice meditation my mind has become a lot more quiet and I no longer think about work things obsessively, I can switch off much more easily and conversely it's made me a lot better at knowing what is and isn't important to work on.
I do envy the people who seem to be able to stay on 24/7 without burning out, but part of me also wonders if there's still a limit to that and perhaps my limit is lower.
My biggest generic life advice for people is "Cultivate curiosity".
The first thing I ask about when people want to know if they should get into programming is how tenacious they are.
I do not believe this narrative that is only confirmed by billionaires themselves. They mostly rely on the work in others for their success, why working more hours would even have an impact?
Example: An accountant who works 8h/d does very taxing, mental work. They require high concentration and precision, it’s often quite boring stuff, but still, they have to get things right, quickly, constantly.
A manager or director might effectively work more hours, but those hours typically have a much more natural rhythm to them. The vast majority of it is communication or preparing for such. The hard part is making the right decisions, listening learning (broad sense), but it’s not detailed and constant.
We programmers tend to complain when we have too many meetings and purely conceptual/communicative work, because it doesn’t „feel“ like work and getting things done, right? There’s a hint there.
For me, 3-4h of highly concentrated programming and testing is much more taxing than a full day of communication/learning. Much more.
But if you truly want to "master" something - then does "constantly thinking about problems" mean you will never benefit from the same 'compounding' effect as someone who has spent 3/5/10 years of their time on that problem?
Or - is all your "need for cognition" - mostly in one domain space (e.g. "Computer Science" or "database structure" etc)?
Dead Comment
https://austinkleon.com/2021/10/04/a-blessed-unrest/
This is Agnes de Mille conversing with the great dancer Martha Graham:
> “But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”
> “No artist is pleased.”
> “But then there is no satisfaction?”
> “No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
Also, I have had this discussion with my Dad, who is 93, and he always tells me how smart I am, of course he is my Dad, but I always tell him how wise he is and how much I want him to share his wisdom with me.
I suppose, most likely, the answer has something to do with where you are in life, but me, being 64, and my Dad being 93, I long for his wisdom. But, then I have nephews, in their 20's who wish for the wealth I have.
It's interesting. I wish I had some wisdom, or truth for you. Sorry. Just observations.
I am 27 and I often think about how to develop more wisdom for life, but it's difficult to find some good resources for it. A collection of wise quotes doesn't go really far in my opinion. The best thing I have found is just lots of introspection and reading books which have stood the test of time. But I wish there was a more straightforward way.
It's also amazing that in the world we live in currently, you can do very well by just not fucking up. EG: someone born in the 80s could just follow "best practices" their whole life so far and be fine - eg: get good grades, study a valuable major, don't eat garbage, don't marry crazy people/idiots, stay off dangerous drugs, and mainly show up to work, be clean and nice - and you can by now be a very successful 40 year old without really having had to innovate or take huge risks. It's amazing.
In a European country, think Spain, Italy, France, "get good grades, study a valuable major, don't eat garbage, don't marry crazy people/idiots, stay off dangerous drugs, and mainly show up to work, be clean and nice" and you are likely to end up with job paying 40 to 80k (before taxes) a year, which is not bad, but I consider that money far from financially making someone "a very successful 40-year-old".
With my STEM major and a PhD, I would have made between 40 and 50k per year before taxes.
As a person living in a (relatively for the western world) low-cost-of-living area, making a decent income for a low-cost-of-living area, it sometimes feels like a local maximum. It would take a sizeable income jump to offset low cost of housing. No doubt the top world cities are the place to be, in terms of all kinds of fun and opportunities, but lifestyle would be worse there unless or until you'd broken into a really high income bracket.
Smart is like a spice, it's great to add to something good to make it better. But it can't be the main thing.
You want to have a good enough mix but I would say, scoring high on any 3 of those should give nice results.
People boast about need to be hard working, having grit or how easy everything comes for attractive people.
Then there is a lot of people who focus on their strengths too much. Like if one is attractive already focusing on improving that will not bring much more to his life. Improving on hard working while being attractive that is going to bring some serious results. Improving on social skills while being hard working the same.
Just mix up some third trait and see how much one can achieve.
Of course one cannot work on "being at the right time at the right place" directly - but other traits if worked on can bring opportunities so like having better social skills can open some doors or make new friends that will have different connections.
I would even say that having 2 of those traits high can bring "being in the right time at the right place" into reality.
Thinking up wild and vivid scenarios in your mind and playing around with ideas and experimenting with concepts is how I've gotten through most of the traditionally difficult subjects I've encountered so far.
Examples:
> A lot of people say to me: “Ivaylo! You are so smart. Your newsletter is full of insights. The books you summarize are so elegantly presented with so much attention and care. Your parents must be proud!” To this, I always respond: “Thanks! I was simply born amazingly gifted.” And then I wake up. I’m kidding, of course. To be honest. I consider myself pretty ordinary in terms of smartness. Actually, the word I’m looking for is average. But there is one quality that helps me fight through my natural stupidity – my unfair advantage sort to say – I’m curious.
> So what’s the problem? It’s this: We spend more time consuming content instead of using the content we consume. And I’m not simply saying this because I think that I’m an omnipotent idol that knows everything. I’m saying this because I feel this way all the time myself. I get lost in the consuming stage – drowning in The Ambitions River – more often than I care to admit.