Curiosity is the strangest mental state. The mind usually craves certainty; being right feels nice; mystery is frustrating. But curiosity pushes back against these lesser wants, compelling us to seek out the unknown and unclear. To be curious is to feel the pleasure of learning, even when what we learn is that we’re wrong.

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The implication, of course, is that curiosity is a defining feature of human development, allowing us to develop “domain-specific” talents – speech, tool use, literacy, chess, etc. – that require huge investments of time and attention.* When it comes to complex skills, failure is often a prerequisite for success; we only learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Curiosity is what draws us to these useful errors. It’s the mental quirk that lets us enjoy the steepest learning curves, those moments when we become all too aware of the endless gaps in our knowledge. The point of curiosity is not to make those gaps disappear – it’s to help us realize they never will.

*A new paper by Christopher Hsee and Bowen Ruan in Psychological Science demonstrates that even curiosity can have negative consequences. Across a series of studies, they show that our “inherent desire” to resolve uncertainty can lead people to endure aversive stimuli, such as electric shocks, even when the curiosity comes with no apparent benefit. They refer to this as the Pandora Effect. I’d argue, however, that the occasional perversities of curiosity are far outweighed by the curse of being incurious, as that can lead to confirmation bias, overconfidence, filter bubbles and all sorts of errors with massive consequences, both at the individual and societal level.

Oudeyer, Pierre-Yves, and L. Smith. “How evolution may work through curiosity-driven developmental process.” Topics in Cognitive Science.

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