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CHAPTER 2

CURIOSITY

Complete the sentence, “Science is …” from a student’s point of view. We would suggest that science is asking questions when you don’t already know the answers. Too often, students think that science is all about distinguishing igneous from sedimentary rock, gases from liquids, or otherwise providing answers that we already know—or at least are supposed to know. But the spirit of scientific inquiry is the same one that drives creative endeavors: curiosity. Curiosity and its cousin, critical thinking, are the gateways to creativity. How we nurture and encourage curiosity, and how we often punish it, will provide insights into how we can expand creativity opportunities for students and teachers. Curiosity is the motivation behind critical thinking. While curiosity is born of an emotional quest—the human desire to know more—critical thinking is the analytical partner, giving us tools to challenge prevailing patterns of thought that fail to satisfy our curious minds.

Warren Berger (2014) defines a beautiful question as “an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change” (p. 8). Questions of any sort—beautiful or not—require the virtue of curiosity. Unfortunately, this virtue is in rare supply. Berger explains:

To encourage or even allow questioning is to concede power—not something that is done lightly in hierarchical companies or in government organizations, or even in classrooms, where a teacher must be willing to give up control to allow for more questioning. (p. 6)

In order to create space in any dialogue, whether among students, educators, administrators, or policymakers, there must first be room for questions to which the answers are unclear and unknown. In a medieval pedagogical setting, the apprentice asks questions and the master provides answers. But in the 21st century, we must all be apprentices and see answers not from all-knowing masters, but from our collective wisdom. If we expect a spirit of genuine inquiry at the highest levels of leadership and policymaking, this acceptance of the unknown must be modeled in the classroom. The teacher who responds to a question, “I don’t know; let’s learn more about this …” is neither uninformed nor incompetent, but a model for the processes of inquiry on which creativity depends.

The Vice of Confidence

One of the constants that’s drilled into us from childhood onward is to believe in ourselves. It is an important component to resilience, and it is easy to understand why we want to instill confidence in our children. Confidence as a trait often begets confidence. Those who are more assured of their own ability to succeed are more likely to take the risks necessary to succeed in the future. Likewise, those who become insecure, constantly doubting themselves, can develop habits that either consciously or subconsciously sabotage their individual efforts. Psychologists call this phenomenon confirmation bias (Kahneman, 2011).

But is there such a thing as too much confidence? What happens when we become confident in beliefs that haven’t been tested? What happens when confidence mutates into closed-mindedness? If we start believing too much in our own hype and belief systems, not only do we run the risk of being blinded to further opportunities by internal orthodoxy but we run the more dangerous risk of not recognizing when we are wrong. Not that there’s anything wrong with … well, being wrong! We all know people who are often wrong but never in doubt. For the rest of us, being wrong about something, and then going through the process of confronting evidence that contradicts our claim, and then going through the slow and sometimes painful process of changing our minds, is an essential part of being human. It is when we refuse to go through that process that we enter the realm of delusion.

Pioneering psychiatrist Karl Jaspers (1963) identifies three indicators of a delusional mindset: (1) certainty of belief and absolute conviction of rightness, (2) incorrigibility, which is defined by the unwillingness to be swayed by evidence that’s contrary to those strongly held beliefs, and (3) beliefs themselves that are strange and bizarre. Jaspers’s work continues to be widely influential in the 21st century (Blackwood, Howard, Bentall, & Murray, 2001). In the context of creative idea generation, it makes sense that one’s beliefs will and perhaps should be strange and bizarre, but the other two indicators of delusion are definitely worth examining. Beliefs can be affirming and comforting on a deep psychological level—especially beliefs we come to and develop ourselves. This makes us predisposed to defending them and protecting them from outside scorn or invalidation. However, if our goal is to develop the best product or idea, it is essential that we hold our own ideas and products to the kind of rigorous examination the rest of the world will. The curious person can celebrate the thrill of discovery, but relentlessly asks, “What is next? What is better? What could I have missed?”

Success itself can harden long-established beliefs that don’t necessarily match every circumstance. Consider the world-altering Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. After astonishing successes against Spain, Italy, Austria, and Prussia, often due to Napoleon Bonaparte’s strategic brilliance, it made sense for the self-proclaimed emperor to be justly confident of not only his own abilities but the tactical principles behind them. So when Napoleon led an army of more than 450,000 soldiers across the border into Russia in an effort to break up their coalition with Britain, it made sense that he would once again outmaneuver his adversaries and prevail. However, he ended up failing spectacularly during a Moscow winter that devastated more than 90 percent of his troops and ruined his reputation (Tufte, 2006).

In some ways, Napoleon’s strategy was effective. His superior forces and strategic impulses won him hard-fought battles throughout his invasion of Russia. But instead of capitulating and beginning the negotiations of defeat like the rest of the forces that Napoleon vanquished, the Russian army had a lot of space into which to retreat and began destroying their cities rather than having them utilized by the French army. Again and again, Napoleon witnessed the Russians employing the same burn-and-run tactics but did not change course, seemingly incapable of or unwilling to recognize the strategy he so firmly believed in could be flawed. Yet when he finally came to Moscow, Napoleon was astonished that the Russians had simply abandoned and scorched their capital. Blinded by his previous successes, Napoleon failed to observe and adapt to the different circumstances. Napoleon was not necessarily wrong about his prowess or ability, but he was simply wrong to think his belief system was universally applicable.

Students elevating confidence over curiosity is similarly problematic. While some students display an overconfidence that can do them a great disservice by limiting curious exploration of questions and critical thinking, in interviews and observations we conducted as research for this book, we found a marked pattern of unwillingness to challenge prevailing wisdom, particularly among girls and women. Overconfidence displayed by men when compared to their female competitors in the job market has a dramatic effect when two otherwise equally qualified people are searching for jobs. This ineffective socialization is hardly an accident.

Mixed Social Cues

While some students’ curiosity may be stunted by overconfidence, on the other end of the spectrum are students who may be stifled by having their curiosity punished. Curiosity requires asking questions—sometimes awkward ones. Like a three-year-old repeatedly asking, “Why? Why? Why?” we must be willing to challenge our parents, friends, and colleagues—not to mention media sources—when their pat answers are insufficient. Although educators sincerely wish to encourage creativity and curiosity, these are often discouraged among half of the human race—females (Sak & Maker, 2006).

“I thought it wasn’t a very good idea, but I didn’t want to be impolite,” said Sara, a fifth grader. This was in response to the invitation to assist one of her classmates in writing her fifth-grade graduation speech. Sara knew that her friend could do better than her first draft, but her desire to soothe feelings was much more powerful than her willingness to criticize a classmate. During the prior two years, this bright and expressive student did not hesitate to engage in vigorous classroom discussions about the relative merits of authors from J. K. Rowling to a fellow student writer. But now she hesitated to challenge even the most obvious errors in reasoning by her classmates. In third grade, she wrote two pages of suggestions to her teachers about how to improve the class, but something happened to Sara’s willingness to forcefully express herself between the third and fifth grades. Although the intellectual skills of students, including their vocabulary, literacy, and mathematics abilities, surge forward from the primary to intermediate grades, their social awareness during those years becomes heightened to the point that they can detect the faint whiff of hurt feelings from a long distance. While students can define critical thinking with some precision and practice it in the abstract—finding flaws in the reasoning of a story problem, for example—they appear to be much more reluctant to make critical thinking a habit of mind in the classroom. Teachers and parents play important roles in socializing children to value interpersonal peace above the conflict that might result from intellectual challenges. Call it the peace paradox: educators and policymakers claim that they value critical thinking as an essential 21st century skill, but in the real world of students and teachers, we value students who are compliant and teachers who provide enthusiastic buy-in for the latest administrative initiative above those who ask the tough questions (Carlone, Scott, & Lowder, 2014).

We interviewed teachers and administrators at all grade levels, and the recurring theme was that the interactions among students and teachers show evidence that critical thinking is giving way to the social imperative of getting along with friends, teachers, and administrators. This trend is particularly worrisome among female students and graduates, who find that the behavior that earned them high grades in school is not necessarily the behavior that leads to success in graduate school and on the job.

The teachers and administrators Doug interviewed were unanimous on one point: “good girls” have been trained from an early age to avoid taking risks or expressing curiosity in terms that might be socially challenging. They particularly avoid risks that might entail strained relationships with peers and adults. Yelena Reznikova, a research analyst in Washington, DC, was a brilliant student and earned an Ivy League degree. She worked in a start-up, rising from analyst to manager. In each situation, she learned to think quickly and improvise. But she noticed that “louder personalities got their ideas heard, while the timid and quiet person was only heard after a louder (and often male) colleague articulated the same idea” (personal communication, May 15, 2015). As Reznikova alludes, there is also a deeply engrained double standard based on gender within the culture, which also teaches many women and girls to stay silent as they are routinely dismissed when expressing the same critiques that, when expressed by men, are accepted (Brescoll, 2012; What Happens, 2015).