Science Reveals - In Truth There Is Joy
A curious case of curiosity has found that happiness positively correlates with truth.
Curiosity kills cats, or so I’ve been told. Rumor on the street is that cats also have nine lives. That means they have eight whole chances to learn something so thoroughly it kills them. We should be so lucky. We think cats are aloof. Maybe it's just because they know so damn much.
Curiosity has gotten a bad rap for a long time (even before the cat quip1). Eve ate that apple. Lot’s wife turned around2. St. Augustine in 397 wrote that God “fashioned hell for the inquisitive”. There was a whole chunk of human history that thought that any thought that wasn't thinking about god was wasteful thinking. Then there was a whole chunk of human history that thought that curiosity was reserved only for those that deserved it. Leonardo DaVinci was renowned (not renounced) as a curious guy. It came to a head when the curiosity of Galileo Galilei was put to trial for the curiosity his curiosity revealed (spoiler alert: we aren’t the center of the universe). Eventually, once we got on boats and started exploring the world, and explorers brought curiosities back to the curious, the benefits of curiosity became overwhelmingly apparent.
Curiosity is a strange thing. We humans need curiosity to help us make sense of the world and about things that help us out day-to-day. Somewhere along the line our curiosity told us that fire is hot and snails can taste good with enough butter and garlic. We pile up practical, useful information about the world through curiosity. But here is where curiosity gets curious, we also pile up information that is perfectly worthless to our existence. Whatever you know about dinosaurs (unless you’re a paleontologist) doesn’t help you live your life. Knowing about the mating dance of the Carnotaurus3 can be amusing, but it’s not going to be of use making your coffee in the morning.
Curiously, curiosity had not been studied very much up until fairly recently. For the longest time it has just been held as a thing we humans do - like being hungry, or wanting sex. It wasn’t until 1954 when someone got curious enough about it to research it4. More recently (2023) some smart humans5 got together to research two different types of curiosity6: Interest Curiosity and Deprivation Curiosity. They discovered some interesting things.
INTEREST CURIOSITY
This type of curiosity is the kind you’re thinking about when you think about curiosity: Learning for the enjoyment of learning and the thrill of discovery. Picture a hole where there is a lack of information about a certain topic. Interest curiosity is perfectly fine with the hole being there, but if the hole is going to be filled it needs to be accurate information. If the hole is filled with wrong info, and new, more accurate, information becomes available, the wrong info is removed and better info is filled in.
Interest curiosity is where curiosity for things that have absolutely no benefit to our lives works. Like knowing about dinosaur mating dances. It has been discovered that discovery through interest curiosity gives us humans a dopamine rush. There is pleasure in discovery.
DEPRIVATION CURIOSITY
This type of curiosity is the kind you’re NOT thinking about: Learning from the anxiety of having a gap in what you know. Picture a hole where there is a lack of information about a certain topic. Deprivation curiosity is definitely not cool about that hole being there. It must be filled at all costs. This type of curiosity can get obsessive (in a good way). It motivates “deep dive” information seeking. This is why paleontologists have jobs figuring out what Carnotauruses do with their stubby, colorful arms. It’s how Einstein realized that E equals MC squared.
Deprivation curiosity has a dark side, though: the hole needs to be filled at all costs - any information will do - accurate or not. Worse, once the hole is filled, people tend to leave it be. Don’t fix what ain’t broken (or some such logic). Deprivation curiosity will cause people to not question sketchy information even after better information has been presented. As you might imagine this leads to all sorts of problems: belief in the unsubstantiated, conspiracy theories, getting trapped in echo chambers, and all of that.
CURIOSITY AND THE TRUTH
You would be forgiven to think that curiosity and truth went hand in hand. That’s what I thought. Learning something meant learning the truth, because if it’s not true, then you haven’t learned it. Right? Apparently wrong. Curiosity’s relationship to truth is dependent on the type of curiosity that is being used.
If you’ve followed me along so far, cool, we just learned something together (fun). But you may think I’m full of shit, which is also cool. You can check my sources and do your own research (deep dive) and perhaps figure out that I am completely wrong. Cool! You let me know, and I will have learned something new (whoops). But if you think I’m wrong just because you think I’m wrong, that’s where things go off the rails (whoa).
We could leave this topic right now and we’d have learned something. Satisfied our curiosity, so to speak. But there is another stone left unturned. Graphing things out reveals another truth about curiosity and its relationship to happiness. The upper righthand corner, where absolute truth and interest curiosity collide is where all the fun is at (or, at least, where the dopamine is). We also know that deprivation curiosity satisfies anxiety and interest curiosity is for the enjoyment of discovery. We can track a couple more data points on this chart.
Turns out that curiosity and the motivation behind that curiosity are positively correlated. So too are the amount of happiness and the amount of truth found in the answers curiosity reveals.
Happiness positively correlates with truth.
Yet… there are unpleasant truths in this world. It is also true that being curious may lead to discovering those unpleasant truths. This realization may cause the fear of knowing the truth to outweigh the truth itself - that the unpleasantness of the truth will be a full-on buzzkill. Yeah, the truth can hurt and therefore ignorance is bliss and all that. There is a real argument for sticking your head in the sand. But, if we’re trading in platitudes, the truth will also set you free.
And now we can add another platitude to the pile, one brought to us through the research of curiosity:
IN TRUTH THERE IS JOY.
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The history of “Curiosity killed the cat” from Phrases.org
Business idea: a salt company called "Lot's Wife".
Wifey-pants and I were watching Prehistoric Planet and there is an episode that describes the Carnotaurus as having very small arms, smaller than the T-Rex, but they were brightly colored. Scientists believe they were used as part of a mating dance. They recreated that dance on the show. This big, ferocious looking monster waving his little bitty colored arms all over the place. Hilarious! So now, in our household, rather than saying “I told you so” (the most annoying of all phrases), we jam our elbows into our sides and wave our arms around in an elaborate, dinosaur inspired dance. It is so much more satisfying than anything we could ever possibly verbalize.
Daniel Berlyne published foundational work beginning with his 1954 paper "A theory of human curiosity," which systematically explored curiosity as a psychological topic and established it as a central subject in experimental psychology.
2016 Wilkins–Bernal–Medawar lecture The curious history of curiosity-driven research
Specifically Daphna Shohamy and Ran Hassin of Columbia University, Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth, and Jonathan Schooler of University of California Santa Barbara.
2023 John Templeton Foundation - Curiosity Has Two Faces
Yes, there are multiple types, up to 17 of them. Definitions of various types of curiosities that have been researched somewhat overlap, the 2 types that are generally agreed upon, or at least most cited, are Interest-Type and Deprivation-Type.
2022 National Library of Medicine - Dimensions, Measures, and Contexts in Psychological Investigations of Curiosity: A Scoping Review
Science, yo.