Todd Kashdan is a psychologist, well-being researcher, and TEDx speaker. He leads the Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University (where he’s also a professor) and conducts research on happiness, curiosity, mental agility, and resilience.
He is also an award-winning author who has published hundreds of articles in peer-reviewed journals. He has penned several books including Curious?, The Upside of Your Dark Side, and The Art of Insubordination. In addition, Dr. Kashdan has been featured in popular press such as The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Newsweek, Time Magazine, Fast Company, to name a few.
1) You and other researchers have made the link that learning from novel experiences is one of the most effective ways to increase happiness. What is the underlying science that supports this assertion?
Curiosity is one of the primary gateways to acquiring knowledge and wisdom. So the question is, does the natural output of being a curious person lead to people being happier? Activities like: acquiring knowledge, acquiring wisdom, growing as a person, expanding your horizons, developing your perspective.
We have a large amount of data showing the qualities of someone that’s a happy person. The number one predictor that distinguishes people that are unhappy from people that are extremely happy—the largest predictor and maybe the only real predictor—ends up being the presence of significant, high-quality relationships.
How do you get significant, high-quality, meaningful relationships?
One of the ways is you have to be willing to be vulnerable, and you need to share important things about yourself. You have to take an interest in other people’s thoughts, ideas, and what they care about. You don’t have to be empathetic, but you have to be interested enough that their wins are something that you want to hear about and you’re excited about when you hear about them. You need to take an interest in their losses and difficulties. You possibly want to do something to help them, and in order for you to discern what that is, you’ll need to get to where their difficulties lie. The undergirding principle of taking an interest in another person is going to be curiosity.
2) What are some other specific ways that curiosity supports increases in opportunities to be delighted and have more fun?
One of the best ways of being curious is to seek out sources of information that are discrepant from your own views, philosophies, and the way you’ve been raised. There are around 200 countries in the world. Most people have only been exposed to about 10, many people far less. So, to begin with, you probably should have a belief system that you lack a sufficient repository of knowledge and experience.
A few things come from that belief system: One, you are fallible. Two, other people have information and perspectives other than your own—an acceptance that novelty potential is out there. Three, you can learn from other people. One of the quickest ways of being curious is exposing yourself to people that don’t think like you, don’t have backgrounds like you, and are going to disagree with you on a number of positions. These don’t have to be people that are going to have moral trip wire positions, such as abortion rights, or gun rights, or whether you should have certain levels for minimum wage, etc.
The important idea here is that you recognize that someone sees the world in a different way than you do and acknowledge the worst things that could happen if you’re exposed to people that hold divergent views from yourself is:
- You have to defend your positions or be open to other positions;
- You realize what the criticisms are for the views that you hold;
- You get to articulate better ways of describing your position;
- You get to articulate why your views are valuable, why they’re functional;
- You realize you know less than you thought that you knew.
Curiosity is a form of self-expansion where your resources, your philosophies, your wisdom, your perspectives … grow. You get to reexamine what you view as opportunities, and what you view as threats. Some of the things you viewed as threats you now see as opportunities, some of the things you viewed as opportunities, now you kind of question yourself as you mature and value different parts of your identity.
So, one of the biggest strategies for becoming more curious is being around people that are different from you. This seems like a very simple strategy that everyone can easily do, but everything evolutionary-wise pulls you to go the other direction. If you’re around other people that think like you, look like you, act like you, this is validation that the way you are in the world is socially attractive. It is easier to empathize with people that have similar opinions to you, and you’re more likely to attract them as friends. So being curious about others, to seek out differences, can sometimes go against our biological wiring.
The very first study I did when I left Wall Street to go into psychology was in the 1990s, long before they had real serious dating websites and apps. We basically asked the question, “What makes people attracted to dissimilar people versus similar people?” What we discovered was that if you can provide some level of evidence that people were going to be accepted and liked and you satisfied that need for acceptance and affiliation, then people made a switch. Instead of pursuing people similar to them, they would pursue people that are different from them because they wanted self-expansion opportunities.
There is a paradox in curiosity, which is to be incurious requires less cortical activity. You zone out; your mind wanders. For instance, you mindlessly talk to your neighbor. You don’t think about what you want to talk about, you don’t think about what they’re going to talk about, you don’t think about what they said last time, you don’t think about what they’re interested in, you don’t think about what they’re passionate about. You just recklessly and impulsively jump into the conversation.
In this scenario, there is very little cortical activity compared to a mindset of curiosity which is: Okay, here are the things that are on my mind right now; these are the things I’d love to talk about; is this too provocative or not? Let me throw it out and see what happens. This is the thing that lit up my neighbor’s face last time, their pupils dilated, they were animated by the discussion, let’s revisit the topic.
That’s a lot of cortical activity!
A really cool finding about curiosity, despite requiring more bodily resources, more cognitive resources, is you actually feel more energized flexing it. You feel more charged up with more mental stamina after a moment of curiosity. Curiosity leads to high energy, yet pleasant states, in its aftermath.
3) In the same way fun and flow are related, I believe one could make a similar argument about the constructs of mindfulness and curiosity. How do you view the contrasts and similarities of mindfulness and curiosity?
This is a good question. Ken Sheldon, a colleague of mine (we edited Designing Positive Psychology together), has conducted some work showing how mindfulness is different from flow. The divergences of the two are as important as where they are similar. For instance, when you’re in a state of mindfulness, you’re in this non-judgmental state, this almost non-striving state, and you’re accepting of whatever happens. In contrast, when you’re in flow, that’s actually not the psychological experience at all. In flow, you are fused with the activity that’s occurring. You are not in this non-judgmental state. You are fully immersed in the activity such that you cannot separate yourself from what you’re doing.
In flow, there is no self-distancing where you’re able to observe your thoughts and your feelings, and you’re accepting of them. You are just going full throttle into a moment. When you’re mountain biking down a ski slope, it’s not mindful. Now, you might be attentive to all the different terrain in terms of whether to veer left or veer right to make sure you survive the hill. The distinction is you are so in the present moment—so lacking in judgment—that you are just completely one with the activity.
How curiosity relates to mindfulness is that they are both intrinsically rewarding missions. Being curious, you have answered two questions: One, is there potential for self-expansion for growth and novelty? Yes. Two, do I think I could handle this novelty, mysteriousness, complexity, uncertainty? Answer yes, and you are motivated to take a step forward, explore and hopefully discover something new.
In a state of mindfulness, you would recognize that there is potential novelty there. You might recognize that you feel you have sufficient agency to go do something, but there’s no striving in a state of mindfulness. In simple terms, you accept the world as it is.
In a curious mindset, you want to close gaps between what you know and what you’d like to know. There’s an active striving element that’s not there in mindfulness, and this might be the reason why—examined in a study we recently published—that if you want to positively predict work-related outcomes, productivity, innovation, being more focused on aspirational goals, curiosity ends up being a huge predictor—where mindfulness doesn’t even stand a chance in comparison to predicting any of these outcomes.
It makes sense because in the workplace you have key performance indicators. You’re striving to meet them. So, in this case, do you want mindful workers or do you want curious explorers? Our data fit with what I hypothesized ahead of time: you want a bunch of curious explorers.
4) In your thorough exploration of the topic, what’s the most misunderstood aspect of curiosity (and why)?
That’s a pretty easy one to answer having done this for over 20 years. People don’t understand that when you step off the terrain of the comfortable world and enter into the novel, the uncertain, the complex, the mysterious—places where there’s the conflict between, “Do I take? Do I approach? Do I avoid?” When you enter this world, which is the world of potential curiosity, there’s inherent anxiety. There’s the anxiety of confronting the new. There’s the anxiety that arises because you don’t know if this will turn out okay. You don’t know if you are going to end up okay physically, mentally, socially. So a big factor that determines whether or not you become curious, maintain curiosity, and act on that curiosity, is can you tolerate the anxiety that arises from the lure of the unknown?
The next level which Robert and I spoke about in our book Upside of the Dark Side, is can you harness the anxiety, the frustration, the disconcerting feeling that arises from confronting the new? If you can say it is better than feeling good. It is better than being happy. It is better than being content. It is better than being prideful. If you can say these emotions are mobilizing energy for me to do something that is better than I would if I was in a state of pleasantness—that’s part and parcel of being a curious person, this type of stress tolerance.
5) You’ve made the strongest case I know of that we should all be more curious, but I assume there have to be a few landmines to watch out for, too, or sayings like, “curiosity killed the cat” wouldn’t exist. What considerations should one be mindful of while cultivating their curiosity habit?
Like any psychological strength, curiosity should always be understood in context. So, you could imagine when relentless curiosity gets in the way of your responsibilities. There are things that are on your to-do list on a weekly basis that have to get done. Things like: “I’ve got to pay the mortgage, I’ve got to water the lawn, I’ve got to make sure there’s gas in the car, I’ve got to make sure that my kids are in school, I should be taking care of yourself physically.” It’s very easy for your curiosity to go awry and potentially get in the way of important activities.
This could be things such as the online portal of information that’s at our fingertips on a daily basis preventing us from enjoying the moment. There’s the temptation of the buzzes of our smartphone in our pocket, which is just this pull for what novel information you may be missing in the online world. You have this feeling of deprivation that occurs, and it pulls you out of whatever is in front of you. It could be being with your kid and looking them in the eye as they’re talking to you. It could be holding someone’s hand after taking a stroll with them. There are no new discoveries in those moments, but there are other needs to be satisfied besides growth. There’s the need for affiliation. There’s the need for giving and receiving love. There’s a need for generativity and caring for the next generation. There’s a need for having positive self-regard for yourself. There’s a need to give other people dignity and respect.
None of those psychological needs are about growth, and many times when we succumb to curiosity, there are trade-offs. When we invest in expanding our sense of self, expanding our knowledge base, and expanding our wisdom, we take time away and energy away from pursuing those other psychological needs. I think it’s really important to see the world as a series of trade-offs, and by doing that, we can make informed decisions of when to be curious—but there are definitely trade-offs, and it would be foolhardy not to acknowledge them.
