Positive Psychology: Curiosity

Hello friends!

As we saw in a text recently published here on the site, Positive Psychology – this new approach to psychology – seeks to create a Sanity Manual, that is, a way of understanding and studying not mental and emotional illnesses, but rather what is good and positive in human beings. This being one of their goals, the positive psychologists drew up an initial list, subject to modification and later reformulation, with 24 character strengths.

In the previous text, we already talked about the first strength of character, creativity. See here – Positive Psychology: Creativity – Today, we’re going to talk about the second strength of character, which is curiosity.

I don’t know if all of you have had the experience that I had at a certain period of my life, which is meeting someone who has no curiosity at all, or perhaps a curiosity so low that it is almost impossible to find them. I say this not to judge or criticize this person, but because to think of a person without curiosity is to think of the other extreme of what it is to have this strength of character. Like in old photos, where we saw the negative of the photo.

Anyway, as it is not, therefore, the objective of positive psychology to think about the negative side, let’s go straight to curiosity

There is a long tradition of research within psychology about what curiosity is. We can think of curiosity as an insatiable thirst for knowledge, a great interest in the world and things. According to Seligman and Peterson, authors of the book that I use as a basis for texts on Positive Psychology, curiosity has the following definition, which is consensual among several researchers:

“Curiosity, interest, novelty seeking, and openness to new experiences represent one’s intrinsic desire for experience and knowledge. Curiosity involves the activities of identifying, seeking out, and regulating experiences in response to challenging opportunities.

Although I would venture to say that there are people who are not curious (or are very little curious), according to the same authors, curiosity is practically a universal human datum, in everyday activities such as:

– being absorbed when watching a movie;

– complete a puzzle;

– open and read with concentration a letter that has just arrived;

– chat with an intriguing stranger;

– listen carefully to a new song on the radio.

And, after this brief listing to say that curiosity is ubiquitous, the authors argue that the question of whether or not someone is curious is much more a question of degree or intensity: “All individuals experience curiosity, but the difference lies in the depth and extension, in its limit and in the desire to experience curiosity”.

Curiosity, interest and search for news

Curiosity and interest, for some authors, are practically identical terms. According to Seligman and Peterson: “When individuals experience these positive states both emotionally and motivationally, they initiate and sustain goal-directed behaviors in response to incentive cues.”

William James also distinguished between two types of curiosity – which throughout the history of psychology continued to be used:

“The first type involves a mixture of anxiety and emotional arousal with regard to exploration and the joy of novelty. The second type would be scientific or metaphysical curiosity, related to a flaw or lack or inconsistency in the knowledge already obtained”. In other words, researchers after James often differentiate between:

– the search for news;

– specific curiosity

The search for novelty can be described as an emotional and motivational state in which the individual is looking for stimulation caused by novelty, complexities, uncertainties, conflicts or seeking to solve problems or issues.

Specific curiosity, on the other hand, is related to the search for a solution to a specific problem or “novelty”, such as situations, objects, events, questions that are closed in themselves.

Although researchers differentiate between the two types of curiosity, we have to think of these strengths of character as being linked, as one type of curiosity necessarily brings out the other.

Another way to consider this difference between types of curiosity is to think of a specific curiosity, a diverse curiosity and a general curiosity. In any case, it is not curiosity, not strength of character that should be defined differently, but only the object or focus of curiosity that would change. For example, being curious about all the knowledge of psychology would be a type of curiosity in search of novelties or diverse curiosity, or even general curiosity. While spending years on end studying the concept of sublimation, for Freud, it would be a specific type of curiosity.

To conclude these definitions, we also have to understand that curiosity ends up generating more curiosity, that is, a curious person seeks and resolves the reason why he was curious and, from that, it is quite likely that the new information will end up raising new curiosities.

Conclusion

I made a point of mentioning people who seem to lack any kind of curiosity so that it would be possible to think, in an inverse way, of what a curious person would consist of. In many regions, curiosity is even thought of as a negative trait, unfortunately.

But to think of someone who is not curious is to think not only of the lack of search for new specific knowledge. It’s thinking of someone who, by definition, is not going to look for anything new. Well, if someone doesn’t look for something new, he will continue with the old, the old, with what happened. And this can be harmful in several ways.

Thinking from the side of positive psychology, we can see how, really, curiosity, interest, the search for novelty is a personality characteristic that should be considered a strength of character and be present in a Handbook of Sanity, of psychic well-being.

Both general curiosity (the search for news) and specific curiosity (of knowledge in a given area) move people and, consequently, move the world, modifying it, making it different, innovative, original, renewed. An individual life, too, begins again when there is this search for the new…

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