Curiosity Is the Engine of Engagement, Not a Lucky Personality Trait

In the amusement and awe post, curiosity showed up for exactly one sentence — Todd Kashdan's definition of it as feeling open and engaged with the people and problems around you — and then I moved on, because it was a supporting mechanism, not the subject. The more I sat with the rest of the Engagement material, the more it looked like I'd buried the lede. Curiosity wasn't one mechanism among several. It was the thing running underneath all of them.

The trouble is that curiosity is the easiest of these traits to write off as luck. Amusement you can practice, flow you can design for, but curiosity feels like a fixed setting — some people are wired to wonder about everything, and the rest of us just want the meeting to end. So "be more curious at work" lands like "be taller."

That framing is what I want to take apart, because it's both wrong and expensive. Companies treat curiosity as a hiring filter — screen for the naturally inquisitive, then wonder why the rest of the team stops asking questions — when the evidence says curiosity is a state you can switch on and a skill that comes in flavors. The argument here: curiosity isn't a personality trait you're stuck with. It's a state triggered by a specific kind of gap (so you can engineer it), it comes in distinct types (so generic "be curious" advice misfires the same way "be funnier" does), and it's the quiet engine under both engagement and the self-directed learning that work increasingly runs on. Treating it as a fixed trait is how organizations accidentally switch it off.

This is still the Engagement pillar I sketched in the four-pillar overview — but where the earlier posts looked at fleeting emotions (amusement, awe) and the work itself (flow, progress), this one is about the appetite that makes you lean into any of it in the first place.

Curiosity is a gap, not a temperament

The cleanest model of where curiosity actually comes from is older than most of the workplace research, and it reframes the whole thing. Economist George Loewenstein's 1994 information-gap theory describes curiosity as a kind of deprivation: the uncomfortable, motivating awareness of a gap between what you know and what you want to know. Curiosity, on this account, isn't a mood that descends on lucky people. It's what you feel when a specific gap opens up in front of you.

The detail that makes it usable is counterintuitive. Total ignorance doesn't produce curiosity — it produces a shrug. You're not curious about a field you know nothing about; you're curious about the one thing missing from a picture you mostly understand. Loewenstein's point is that a priming dose of information is what sparks the hunger for the rest, the way a hint of a melody makes you need to hear the resolution. Curiosity isn't lit by what you don't know; it's lit by what you almost do.

That reframes the management problem entirely. If curiosity is a gap, then a person who "isn't curious" in a meeting often just can't see a gap — the work was handed to them sealed, with no visible seam to pull on. Give the same person enough context to notice what's missing, and the appetite shows up on its own. You don't recruit curiosity. You expose the gap that creates it.

It's not one thing — and that's why generic advice fails

If curiosity were a single trait, "be more curious" would at least be coherent advice. But Kashdan and colleagues' 2018 work on the Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale found it isn't one thing at all. They define curiosity broadly — "the recognition, pursuit, and desire to explore novel, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous events" — and then break that umbrella into five distinct dimensions.

The dimension I keep thinking about is stress tolerance, because it's the one that decides whether the other four ever get used. Curiosity pulls you toward the unknown, and the unknown is, by definition, uncomfortable — you have to be willing to feel the not-knowing long enough to explore it. A person can be high in joyous exploration and still freeze at work, because the anxiety of looking ignorant outweighs the pull of the gap. Stress tolerance is the gate.

Kashdan's group then did something more useful than ranking the dimensions: they sorted people into four types based on their profiles across all five.

This is the same lesson the humor post landed on from a different direction. "Be funnier" fails because people copy a style that isn't theirs; "be more curious" fails the same way, because the Problem Solver and the Empathizer are running on different engines. Telling an Empathizer to get fascinated by the technical edge cases will bounce off — but pointing them at what the customer is actually confused about lights them up, because that's a gap in their dimension. The move isn't to manufacture a generic curious person. It's to find the gap that fits the type already in front of you.

What curiosity actually buys at work

It would be easy to treat all of this as a personality curiosity rather than a workplace one, so it's worth being concrete about what the appetite does once it's switched on. Harvard Business School's Francesca Gino surveyed more than 3,000 employees for her 2018 Harvard Business Review piece, "The Business Case for Curiosity," and the through-line is that curiosity isn't decorative — it changes how people work.

Gino's summary of the evidence: when curiosity is triggered, people think more deeply and more rationally about decisions and generate more creative solutions; teams with more curiosity have fewer conflicts and more open communication; and leaders who show inquisitiveness earn more trust from the people they lead. In her own survey, 92% of respondents credited curious people with bringing new ideas, and tied curiosity to higher motivation, satisfaction, and job performance.

The reason the conflict finding isn't obvious is worth slowing down on. You'd expect curiosity to create friction — more questions, more challenging of assumptions. Gino's reading is the opposite: curiosity makes people more likely to put themselves in a colleague's position and less likely to lock into their own story, which is exactly what de-escalates a disagreement. The questioner who genuinely wants to understand is harder to fight with than the one who's already decided.

The gap between knowing it helps and letting it happen

Here's where the trait framing does real damage, and Gino's data names it. Even though leaders broadly say they value inquisitive minds, most workplaces quietly suppress curiosity, because in the moment it reads as inefficiency and risk — a question is a delay, a tangent, a challenge to the plan. The result is a striking gap: in Gino's survey, only about 24% of employees reported feeling curious in their jobs on a regular basis, and roughly 70% said they face barriers to asking more questions at work.

That 24% is the whole argument against the trait theory in one number — it isn't a count of how many curious people exist, it's a count of the ones the room let stay curious. If curiosity were just an inborn distribution, you'd expect the workplace figure to roughly match how curious people are in the rest of their lives — and it doesn't come close. The shortfall is the part the workplace is actively switching off. Gino's recommended fixes line up exactly with treating curiosity as a state rather than a trait: hire for it, but more importantly model it, reward learning goals rather than only performance goals, and make room for "Why?", "What if…?", and "How might we…?" as legitimate questions instead of threats to the timeline.

This is also why the authenticity catch from the awe post applies here. You can't mandate curiosity any more than you can mandate a good mood. What you can do is stop punishing the question — because the gap that creates curiosity only gets explored if it's safe to admit you don't already know. Otherwise you hand people the work sealed shut, then call them incurious for not finding the seam you hid.

Curiosity is the appetite that powers self-directed learning

The place curiosity earns its "engine" billing most clearly is learning — and the kind of learning work increasingly depends on isn't the kind anyone assigns you. A 2024 TalentLMS survey of 1,000 U.S. employees found that 68% of them had improved a work skill outside of any employer-provided training in 2023, up from 57% the year before. Most skill-building now happens off the official syllabus, driven by the person, not the program.

That's curiosity doing its job. Loewenstein's gap is the same mechanism underneath self-directed learning: you notice something you can't quite do or explain, the gap nags, and you go close it — a tutorial at lunch, a question to the one person who knows, an hour reverse-engineering how a colleague pulled something off. Nobody scheduled it. The appetite scheduled it.

The loop at the end of that diagram is the part I find genuinely useful. Closing one gap doesn't satisfy curiosity for good — it raises your vantage point enough to reveal gaps you couldn't even perceive before, which is why learning compounds in curious people and stalls in incurious ones. It also explains why curiosity and engagement are so hard to separate: the self-directed learner is, almost by definition, an engaged employee, because they keep finding reasons to lean back in.

Curiosity is the thread under the rest of the pillar

Once you see curiosity as the engine, the other Engagement posts in this series stop looking like separate topics and start looking like the same appetite showing up in different costumes.

The links aren't loose analogies — they're in the data I already cited earlier in the series. Sara Gottlieb and colleagues found that dispositional awe predicts curiosity (the awe post leaned on the cognition side of that paper, but the curiosity link is right there too). Remus Ilies and colleagues found that people high in openness to experience — curiosity's closest personality cousin — actually need flow to feel good at work, and suffer more than others when they can't find it. Amusement, for its part, loosens thinking enough that the gaps feel safe to poke at. Curiosity is the common cause sitting underneath all three.

"Isn't some of this just personality, though?"

The honest counterargument is that I've overcorrected. Surely curiosity is partly dispositional — the Kashdan types include "Avoiders" for a reason, and openness to experience is one of the more stable personality traits we measure. Isn't "curiosity is a trainable state" just a comfortable story?

It's a fair objection, and the answer is to concede the floor without conceding the ceiling. Yes, people differ in their baseline appetite, and yes, the Avoiders (19% of Kashdan's sample) start further back. But two things keep that from rescuing the trait theory. First, the 24% workplace figure is far below any plausible baseline distribution of curious people — most of that gap is situational suppression, not missing temperament. Second, the information-gap mechanism doesn't care much about your baseline: expose anyone to a clear, bounded gap in something they already partly understand, and the pull shows up, because that's how the mechanism works. Personality sets where you start. It doesn't set whether the room you're in switches the appetite on or off — and the room is the part a workplace controls.

So the trait is real and it isn't the lever. The lever is whether the environment opens gaps and makes it safe to chase them — which is squarely something you can change.

Curiosity, in one frame

The clean way to hold it: curiosity is what you feel when a gap opens in something you already half-understand, it comes in types so there's no single way to "be curious," and it's the appetite that quietly powers good decisions, self-directed learning, and engagement. None of that depends on having been born wondering about everything. It depends on whether the gaps are visible and whether the question is safe to ask.

A few things I'm taking away

• Curiosity isn't a fixed temperament — Loewenstein's information-gap theory frames it as a triggerable state, the motivating awareness of a gap between what you know and what you want to know
• Total ignorance kills curiosity; a priming dose of partial knowledge is what creates the gap, so the way to spark it is to expose the seam, not to recruit the personality
• Kashdan and colleagues found curiosity has five dimensions and four types — which is why "be more curious" misfires like "be funnier," and why the move is to find the gap that fits the type in front of you
• Stress tolerance is the quiet gatekeeper: the pull toward the unknown only gets used by people willing to sit with the discomfort of not knowing
• Gino's survey of 3,000+ employees ties curiosity to better decisions, fewer conflicts, more open communication, and more trust in leaders — and 92% credited it with new ideas
• The damning number is that only ~24% feel curious at work while ~70% hit barriers to asking questions — far below any baseline, which means most of the gap is suppression, not missing temperament
• Curiosity is the engine of self-directed learning — 68% of employees built skills outside employer training in 2023 — and closing one gap reveals bigger gaps, so it compounds
• Awe raising curiosity and open people needing flow aren't separate findings — they're the same appetite under the whole Engagement pillar

It's the 24% I can't talk myself out of. It's tempting to read a low number like that as proof that curious people are rare and you either hire them or you don't. But you can't be that far below baseline by accident — that gap is the sound of a lot of people who walked in with questions and learned to keep them to themselves. Curiosity at work isn't scarce because the wiring is scarce. It's scarce because we keep sealing the work shut and frowning at the question. The fix isn't a personality test. It's leaving a seam to pull on, and not making people pay for pulling it.

Sources

• Loewenstein, G. (1994) — "The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation," Psychological Bulletin 116(1). Used for: the information-gap theory of curiosity, the "priming dose" idea, and the point that total ignorance doesn't spark curiosity
• Kashdan, T. B., Stiksma, M. C., Disabato, D. J., et al. (2018) — "The Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale: Capturing the bandwidth of curiosity and identifying four unique subgroups of curious people," Journal of Research in Personality 73. Used for: the five dimensions, the four types and their percentages, and the broad definition of curiosity
• Kashdan, T. — Curiosity research, George Mason University. Used for: the framing of curiosity as openness and engagement with people and problems (carried over from the amusement-and-awe post)
• Gino, F. (2018) — "The Business Case for Curiosity," Harvard Business Review (Sep–Oct). Used for: the 3,000-employee survey, the 24%/70%/92% figures, the decision/conflict/trust findings, and the recommendations (model it, reward learning goals, "Why/What if/How might we")
• TalentLMS (2024) — L&D trends research, survey of 1,000 U.S. employees. Used for: the 68% (up from 57%) of employees who built skills outside employer-provided training
• Gottlieb, S., Keltner, D., & Lombrozo, T. (2018) — "Awe as a scientific emotion," Cognitive Science 42(6). Used for: dispositional awe predicting curiosity (the link tying awe to this post)
• Ilies, R., et al. (2017) — "Flow at work and basic psychological needs," Applied Psychology 66(1). Used for: openness to experience moderating flow's benefits — open people need flow most
• Keltner, D. — "Cultivating Positive Emotions at Work," Science of Happiness at Work, BerkeleyX. Used for: the engagement framing that places curiosity under positive emotions