Being Curious is a Moral Obligation
Don Peppers
Customer experience expert, keynote speaker, business author, Founder of Peppers & Rogers Group
Why did you choose to read this particular LinkedIn Post, right now? What was it that motivated you to take the trouble?
Your mind – everyone’s mind – craves knowledge and explanations. The brain thrives on novelty, always hungry for new information, new insights, and interesting things to think about. Each of us has the desire simply to know why and how things happen.
Curiosity is innate to the human species, having been demonstrated in studies of infants as young as two months old. Toddlers interacting with their caregivers have been clocked at more than a hundred inquiries an hour, the majority of which are requests for information, such as “what is that called?” Preschoolers interacting with their parents ask 25 or more questions an hour, an increasing number of which tend to be “how” or “why” questions, ranging from the scientific (“why does it have to be cloudy to rain?”) to the absurd (“what happens if your eyes turn into flies?”).
Nor is it difficult to explain how curiosity evolved in human beings. Figuring out that birds suddenly start chattering when they spot a predator would have allowed an early hominid to avoid becoming some leopard’s lunch, for instance. Understanding how to fashion a stone axe, or when the right time is to plant, or why steam rises – all these things have contributed to the survival and welfare of human beings. And the rewards of curiosity are greatly magnified by our social natures. Anything anyone learns that is useful, others can rapidly learn also. The entirety of our technological progress is the inevitable result of satisfying our insatiable curiosity about how the world around us works, and then sharing what we’ve learned with others. We’ve had curiosity bred into us through thousands of generations, because the more our relatively large brains can comprehend about our situation and the environment we inhabit, the more likely it is we’ll live long enough to pass on our genes. If the biological world is driven by the survival of the fittest, then curiosity is definitely one of the qualities making the human species more “fit” to survive.
But of course, explaining curiosity in evolutionary terms is itself the product of curiosity, isn’t it? We’re naturally curious to know just why and how we are so curious.
And curiosity is not just a natural trait but also a state of mind. Our level of curiosity at any one moment in time is affected by our own immediate experience and observations. Unusual or unexpected things arouse our curiosity, but we can also will ourselves to be curious.
Moreover, curiosity can be taught. As with any other state of mind, there is a social element to curiosity. Children whose questions are answered will ask even more questions. If they don’t get answers, they stop asking. With practice, being curious (or incurious) can become a habit of thinking.
It you think about it, curiosity is the basis of our consciousness and almost all truly deliberative thinking. Focusing our “attention” is the essence of conscious thought, but whenever we give our conscious attention to anything at all, whether it’s a physical object or an abstract concept, we are seeking to understand it, or to predict what is likely to happen because of it. We are engaged in the act of trying to explain it to ourselves, in order to anticipate how it or similar things might affect us.
The astrophysicist David Deutsch goes so far as to suggest that our curiosity is the most important feature that marks us as human in the first place, and will inevitably propel the human race to more and better technology, more and better knowledge, and an ever greater role in the universe. In his marvelous book The Beginning of Infinity he argues that human beings are natural problem solvers, always seeking better explanations for how things work around us. But the more problems we solve and the more things we explain, the more explanations we will seek. Knowledge may be expanding exponentially, but our ignorance is expanding even faster, because the more we know, the more additional things we learn that we do not know.
Moreover, curiosity is a moral duty. After all, lack of curiosity suggests not just intellectual laziness but contempt for the facts. Being willfully incurious, whether as an individual or a society, is tantamount to refusing to search for the truth. Being curious is simply striving to understand what the truth of something really is.
But if truth is a virtue, then curiosity is a virtue as well.
Customer Success & Stakeholder Engagement Specialist | Certified Project & Product Management Professional | Problem-Solver
8 年Interesting read.
Commercial Director l Life Science Solutions
8 年I thoroughly enjoyed this article, and I want you to know that I founded my coaching-focused company on this principle – that being curious is a moral obligation. Being curious is the foundation of the scientific method and all of the inquiries that make us uniquely human.
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8 年i am sorry to say that many parents thrive in leaving children playing alone as not to make them bored but then the instant they get injured then they will be very sorry and it's too late to arrange the damage if not loosing the child which apart of being very sore you have also to respond fro the police and jurisdiction trial. So my aim to to give the best advice to parents not to let children out of their eyes and thanks for acceptance
Executive Director-Citizens Bureau for Development and Productivity-CIBDAP/LNP
8 年Read through enjoyably. Better curious than not.