Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back, or so goes at least one of a number of the idiom’s versions. It’s not true, of course. Curiosity’s no killer. In fact, when speaking of learning, quite the opposite: satisfaction kills, while curiosity births.
Some terms: By satisfaction I don’t mean, here, the satisfaction one gets from a job well done, a task successfully completed, or even the type demanded as a means of restoring lost honour, but rather the feeling that results from being satiated, from having an appetite more than fully answered, from being so full-up as to no longer desire. It’s a condition of non-inquiring stasis, of indifference. Meanwhile, its opposite is curiosity, ‘the desire,’ says Jordan Litman, ‘to know, to see, or to experience - that motivates exploratory behaviour towards the acquisition of new information.’ Satisfaction and curiosity, as understood in the sense of our inverted idiom, couldn’t be more different.
So, to begin: In his all encompassing paper Curiosity and the Pleasures of Learning Litman traces the (academic) history of the psychology of curiosity, defining - and elaborating on - two seemingly mutually exclusive schools of thought, the so-called curiosity-drive theory and the later optimum arousal model, after which, having shown how each has fallen out of favour, offers up a synthesis of the two, a model that explores the idea that curiosity is determined by two different but complementary forms: deprivation and interest.
Very briefly, curiosity-drive theory postulates that our desire to know is driven not by out and out interest, but rather by the want to make right uncertainty, a desire that asserts itself in the face of novel, complex and ambiguous stimuli. Thus, students’ motivation to solve a puzzle or open-ended enquiry arises from the curiosity as stimulated by the mess or incoherence the puzzle or enquiry creates. Though reductive and so negative, the drive to un-confuse begins to explain research that finds confusion the best predictor for ‘deep and lasting learning’. We are curious in order that we manage to work through and so escape muddle making stimuli, the knowledge that restores certainty our final reward.
Ingenious, sure, but as a theory, curiosity-drive only works if stimuli can be shown to exist. It does not explain why we go on being curious despite a lack of uncertainty making stimuli, or why rather than direct our energy toward righting uncertainty, we are motivated to avoid it all together. So, when bored or overrun by the intensity of an environment, we continue to be curious, either positively seeking out a known stimulus - a song, for example, a piece of art, a story – or actively searching for an alternative source of stimuli . This so-called inductive (as opposed to reductive) form of curiosity psychologists called optimum arousal, arguing that the reward here is interest – as opposed to certainty.
As Litman says, it’s an elegant model, and neatly explains non-utilitarian interests such as those that drive us to contemplate art or to seek thrills or why a student showing no interest in a mathematical problem concentrates entirely on the business of using his or her ruler to reflect light into the teacher’s eyes. However, as with curiosity-drive theory, the optimum arousal model is shot through with the inexplicable. If a pleasure seeker’s curiosity requires perpetual arousal, why would they, asks Litman, ‘ever endeavour to learn anything new’ – given that it ‘ultimately leads to aversive states of boredom’? The hedonic nature of arousal fails to account for the way we are motivated to grapple with problems, to accept frustration, to work through confusion, to learn from effort.
However, and to get to the point, while each theory in itself fails to fully explain what it is that motivates us to want and like learning, a combination of the two, postulates Litman, does. So: We understand today that wanting and liking are the result of two different but interactive subcortical neurobiological systems. The former, says Litman, involves mesolimbic dopamine activation, known to ‘motivate approach behaviour and to attribute incentive value to stimuli associated with reward.’ The latter involves the opioids producing nucleus accumbens, responsible for handling the evaluation of stimuli in terms of ‘immediate and anticipated hedonic impact and corresponding affective value.’
Meaning, and when working well, when neither too high nor too low, wanting (dopamine) produces in us the security and motivation with which to explore, while liking (opioids) is the consequential pleasure of such exploration. Litman: ‘Wanting and liking systems play a central role in the stimulation of curiosity and the rewards of subsequent knowledge acquisition.’ Further, and especially interesting to educators, the quality of that curiosity depends on how stimulated each system is, and how they then interact.
Thus, high levels of wanting and high levels of liking produce almost uncomfortably strong emotions, so much so that we are driven to seek ‘cognitive closure’, the answer, the solution. It’s a form of curiosity that corresponds, says Litman, to the feelings-of-deprivation idea as expressed in curiosity-drive theory, the outcome a type of learning much more performance-orientated than anything else. Meanwhile, low levels of wanting and high levels of liking stimulate in us a form that corresponds to optimum arousal type curiosity, a curiosity that, interest driven, is much more about knowledge for knowledge’s sake, a take-it-or-leave-it learning that is all about the joy of mastery. Clearly a combining of the two is ideal, so manageable levels of both want and like make for a curiosity that in the psychologist Daniel Berlyne once termed ‘epistemic’, a curiosity that is all about the desire of knowledge.
Finally, beyond curiosity, as all of us know and occasionally feel, there are those periods of stasis, when neither driven nor aroused, we are non-curious, lack motivation and feel no inclination to learn. Perversely, in the context of learning, and as alluded to at the beginning of this post, this will occur when satisfied that we know what there is to know; for, as the ‘knowledge gap’ work of George Lowenstein (and subsequent research) shows, we are most curious when we want to know more about what we already know a little bit about, and also at the point just before actually attaining it, when the answer’s on the tip of our tongue. Conversely, if we have absolutely no idea of what’s going on, or once we know, tests show that curiosity levels flatline.
All of which takes some following, but feels absolutely crucial when thinking about how to harness curiosity in the name of good learning. Crucial, then, to the relationships we form in the classroom; to the types of learning we’re after; and to understanding how in the case of certain learners (anxious, lacking in confidence or seemingly unable to put the effort in) the desire for escape far outweighs the desire for certainty, or in others, how the ability to solve maths problems does not necessarily translate into a love for listening to stories, or in still others, a lesson seems to have stimulated nothing. If we take, as I think we must, curiosity to be the mother of all learning, then understanding how curiosity works is to know that which good teaching has always known: that is, curiosity does not kill cats.
Read Part I: Pleasure Principles
Read Part II: An Apology for Confusion
