Marketing Scoops: Want Influence? Use Intelligent Curiosity

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One of the most beneficial skills entrepreneurs can develop is how to apply intelligent curiosity to everyday situations. Even better is to develop situational awareness alongside the skill of intelligent curiosity. It’s where you are consciously aware of what’s going on around you. It’s a 360-degree awareness of both threats and opportunities. An example of this strategy is to sit with your back to a wall or in a position where you can see everything and everyone around you.….Continue reading…

By: LISA PATRICK

Source: Entrepreneur

Critics:

Curiosity-driven behavior is often defined as behavior through which knowledge is gained a form of exploratory behavior. It therefore encompasses all behaviors that provide access to or increase sensory information. Berlyne divided curiosity-driven behavior into three categories: orienting responses, locomotor exploration, and investigatory responses or investigatory manipulation.

Previously, Berlyne suggested that curiosity also includes verbal activities, such as asking questions, and symbolic activities, consisting of internally fueled mental processes such as thinking (“epistemic exploration”). Like other desires and need-states that take on an appetitive quality (e.g. food/hunger), curiosity is linked with exploratory behavior and experiences of reward. Curiosity can be described in terms of positive emotions and acquiring knowledge; when one’s curiosity has been aroused it is considered inherently rewarding and pleasurable.

Discovering new information may also be rewarding because it can help reduce undesirable states of uncertainty rather than stimulating interest. Theories have arisen in attempts to further understand this need to rectify states of uncertainty and the desire to participate in pleasurable experiences of exploratory behaviors.

Curiosity-drive theory posits undesirable experiences of “uncertainty” and “ambiguity”. The reduction of these unpleasant feelings is rewarding. This theory suggests that people desire coherence and understanding in their thought processes. When this coherence is disrupted by something that is unfamiliar, uncertain, or ambiguous, an individual’s curiosity-drive causes them to collect information and knowledge of the unfamiliar to restore coherent thought processes.

This theory suggests that curiosity is developed out of the desire to make sense of unfamiliar aspects of one’s environment through exploratory behaviors. Once understanding of the unfamiliar has been achieved and coherence has been restored, these behaviors and desires subside.

Derivations of curiosity-drive theory differ on whether curiosity is a primary or secondary drive and if this curiosity-drive originates due to one’s need to make sense of and regulate one’s environment or if it is caused by an external stimulus. Causes can range from basic needs that need to be satisfied (e.g. hunger, thirst) to needs in fear-induced situations.

Each of these derived theories state that whether the need is primary or secondary, curiosity develops from experiences that create a sensation of uncertainty or perceived unpleasantness. Curiosity then acts to dispel this uncertainty. By exhibiting curious and exploratory behavior, one is able to gain knowledge of the unfamiliar and thus reduce the state of uncertainty or unpleasantness.

This theory, however, does not address the idea that curiosity can often be displayed even in the absence of new or unfamiliar situations. This type of exploratory behavior, too, is common in many species. A human toddler, if bored in his current situation devoid of arousing stimuli, will walk about until he finds something interesting. The observation of curiosity even in the absence of novel stimuli pinpoints one of the major shortcomings in the curiosity-drive model.

Optimal-arousal theory developed out of the need to explain this desire to seek out opportunities to engage in exploratory behaviors without the presence of uncertain or ambiguous situations. Optimal-arousal suggests that one can be motivated to maintain a pleasurable sense of arousal through such exploratory behaviors.

When a stimulus is encountered that is associated with complexity, uncertainty, conflict, or novelty, this increases arousal above the optimal point, and exploratory behavior is employed to learn about that stimulus and thereby reduce arousal again. In contrast, if the environment is boring and lacks excitement, arousal is reduced below the optimal point and exploratory behavior is employed to increase information input and stimulation, and thereby increasing arousal again.

This theory addresses both curiosity elicited by uncertain or unfamiliar situations and curiosity elicited in the absence of such situations. Cognitive-consistency theories assume that “when two or more simultaneously active cognitive structures are logically inconsistent, arousal is increased, which activates processes with the expected consequence of increasing consistency and decreasing arousal.”

Similar to optimal-arousal theory, cognitive-consistency theory suggests that there is a tendency to maintain arousal at a preferred, or expected, level, but it also explicitly links the amount of arousal to the amount of experienced inconsistency between an expected situation and the actually perceived situation. When this inconsistency is small, exploratory behavior triggered by curiosity is employed to gather information with which expectancy can be updated through learning to match perception, thereby reducing inconsistency.

This approach associates curiosity with aggression and fear. If the inconsistency is larger, fear or aggressive behavior may be employed to alter the perception in order to make it match expectancy, depending on the size of the inconsistency as well as the specific context. Aggressive behavior alters perception by forcefully manipulating it into matching the expected situation, while fear prompts flight, which removes the inconsistent stimulus from the perceptual field and thus resolves the inconsistency.

Taking into account the shortcomings of both curiosity-drive and optimal-arousal theories, attempts have been made to integrate neurobiological aspects of reward, wanting, and pleasure into a more comprehensive theory for curiosity. Research suggests that desiring new information involves mesolimbic pathways of the brain that account for dopamine activation.

The use of these pathways, and dopamine activation, may be how the brain assigns value to new information and interprets this as reward.This theory from neurobiology can supplement curiosity-drive theory by explaining the motivation of exploratory behavior. Cognitive-consistency theories assume that “when two or more simultaneously active cognitive structures are logically inconsistent, arousal is increased, which activates processes with the expected consequence of increasing consistency and decreasing arousal.”