If you were trying to decide between two equally qualified job candidates, how would you make the decision?
I’d look for the more curious person.
In football — much of sports for that matter — they say that speed is that attribute that you cannot teach. In life, curiosity is the attribute that we don’t coach.
Curiosity must come from within. You can develop it, just the way you can learn to run faster through dedicated practice. But curiosity isn’t ignited from a switch.
When solving problems, intellect and education are important. But without curiosity, they are simply cars that will never leave the garage.
Some curiosity is innate. My 5-year-old will wear you out with questions of ever-increasing complexity. It’s just who she is.
It’s not who everyone is. We must work harder to foster curiosity among our children, students, colleagues, friends, and selves.
“Why” is the most powerful word in the English language.
Campaigns and curiosity
Last spring I was teaching our senior-level advertising campaigns capstone class. Our client was proprietary, but let’s say it was the kind of business that you’d see in a strip mall.
Our budget was small, and that made the challenge more difficult.
Some of the students would sit in the team meetings utterly stumped.
“Where do we start?” they asked.
I’m curious, perhaps to a fault.
If the business is in a strip mall on the corner, which street gets more traffic? Call the city engineer to see whether you can get that data.
How do people make decisions in that product category? Find the consumer behavior data.
What is the average purchase? Do people buy alone or together? Do people decide to go to that business close to the purchase time or the day before?
In short, know everything. You never know which key detail will be the one that leads to the crucial insight.
If you’re asking, “Can we stop researching yet?” then you aren’t curious enough.
Curiosity may kill the cat, but it is absolutely crucial for advertising, public relations, marketing, and especially social media.
The world is a question
I honestly believe that my job is the best job in the entire world because I spend much of my time in the experimental lab trying to answer the question “why.”
We get to use science to try to make predictions about the psychological substrates of emotion, attention, memory, and persuasion — what many people call neuromarketing today. Then we attempt to design clever experiments to test our predictions. How cool is that?
I’d advised many students that a social science based master’s program can be more valuable than an MBA. Sure, the MBA student will know more about finance, but the social scientist will know more about asking and answering questions.
Undergraduate students need to work harder to become involved in faculty research during their four years. My very best students always show up in the lab wanting to know more.
A more curious you
Perhaps you’ve already achieved your maximum curiosity. Most haven’t.
They’ve simply settled for an endless array of “just because” answers. Train yourself to ask “why.” Train yourself to dig down. Never settle for “just because.”
Then, the next time you’re applying for a job or promotion, you will be the more curious among those equally qualified. You will see the key insight where others simply see data.
The business of applied persuasion represents an intricate puzzle. Curiosity simplifies and clarifies that puzzle.
How do you become more curious? Tell us in the comments. I’m curious what you think.
Photo credit: Elilio Del Prado.
I'm a cognitive scientist and communication scholar who manages a psychophysiology lab at Texas Tech. I teach courses about the cognitive processing of media messages and research methods.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
There’s definitely a social aspect to curiosity, as well as an inner, innate one. I find myself being more curious when I surround myself with other people who are also curious. And when people get excited about my insights – well then, it just makes an inferno out of a spark. If there’s anything more exciting than having a lightbulb go off in ones own head, it’s seeing one go off in someone else’s head.
That’s a great, caveat: surround yourself with curious people.
I think there’s a real corollary here with creativity, too. That’s one of the great things of being part of a vibrant research lab. We feed off of one another.
curiosity may have killed the cat, but as my mother loves to say “satisfaction brought him back.” Without a healthy dose of curiosity, we wouldn’t have most, if any, of the things that make our lives easier, more enjoyable and healthier. I don’t think I’ll ever stop asking why, as much as it seems to annoy many people around me.
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