CHAPTER 5

The Curiosity Dividend

Education is the single biggest factor in determining whether or not individuals are likely to prosper in today’s world. The gap between the college-educated populations of developed countries and everyone else is growing wider. Most of us live in an economic environment that, more than ever before, rewards learners and penalises the ignorant or unskilled.

On a global scale, the nations with a higher proportion of young people at college are those whose economies tend to grow fastest. In Europe and in the US, the costs of higher education are rising at a greater rate than average incomes — but the cost of not being educated is rising even faster. In the US today, college graduates earn eighty per cent more than those who don’t graduate from high school.

The gateway to higher education is academic performance at school. Naturally, then, an increasing amount of attention has been paid to the question of what makes some people do better at school than others. We know that socio-economic factors play a big part, but what role is played by an individual’s ability and outlook? The most exhaustively studied factor is intelligence. Although there continues to be controversy over the reliability and significance of IQ scores, there is plenty of evidence that intelligence, or ‘cognitive ability’, is strongly correlated with academic performance.

But IQ is far from the sole determinant of success. Every experienced teacher has stories about clever kids who left school without the qualifications that less talented peers achieved, and university tutors know that sometimes the most intelligent students are also the laziest. In recent years, psychologists studying differences in educational achievement have been paying more attention to the question of ‘non-cognitive traits’, by which they mean something like personality, or character. It’s now recognised that the attitude students take towards the learning process, and the habits they practise, have a bigger impact on how well they do at school than previously accounted for. This effect becomes more pronounced at more advanced levels of education, as differences in intellectual capacity flatten out. A longitudinal study of elite British students found that personality traits account for four times as much variance in exam results than intelligence.

So which personality traits are important? The trait that has gained most attention from researchers is ‘conscientiousness’ and its related qualities: persistence, self-discipline, and what the psychologist Angela Duckworth termed ‘grit’ — the ability to deal with failure, overcome setbacks and focus on long-term goals. This group of attitudes is consistently correlated with high achievement.22 More recently, powerful evidence has emerged of another personality trait with a comparable impact on educational success.

Sophie von Stumm, a lecturer in psychology at Goldsmiths University, led a review of existing research on individual differences in academic performance, gathering data from 200 studies, covering a total of about 50,000 students. She hypothesised that intellectual curiosity — the tendency to ‘seek out, engage in, enjoy and pursue opportunities for effortful cognitive activity’ — would count towards success, because students who possessed it would be hungry to learn information and explore new ideas. The data proved her right: von Stumm and her collaborators found that curiosity had roughly as big an effect on performance as conscientiousness. When put together, the personality traits of conscientiousness and curiosity count for as much as intelligence. A hungry mind, according to von Stumm, is the ‘third pillar’ of academic achievement.

In 2012, researchers at University College London carried out a massive meta-analysis of studies published between 1997 and 2010, the product of 241 data sets, with the aim of determining which aspects of a high school student’s background and personality best predict success at college. Their findings are strikingly similar to von Stumm’s. The researchers investigated three categories of potential predictors: demographic factors like sex and social class, conventional measures of cognitive ability like IQ and academic achievement in high school, and forty-two character traits which have at one time or another been held to be influential on educational outcomes, such as self-esteem or optimism. They found that demographic factors played little part in college success (factors like social class play their biggest role in determining who gets to college in the first place). The best predictors of success were intelligence and performance at school. After that, nothing else counted for much, except for conscientiousness and NFC — ‘need for cognition’, the scientific proxy for curiosity.

The logic is intuitive enough; an intelligent child won’t reach her potential unless she applies consistent effort over time, and she is less likely to apply consistent effort if she is low on intrinsic desire to learn. But it’s only now that researchers can quantify the importance of curiosity to educational outcomes. In fact, von Stumm thinks that curiosity may be the best single predictor of individual success, because it incorporates intelligence, persistence and hunger for novelty in one. People who are genuinely interested in what they’re learning about tend to work harder at understanding it. We also know that the feeling of being interested enhances thinking. The psychologist Paul Silvia explains that when people are interested in what they’re reading, they pay closer attention, process the information more efficiently, make more connections between new and existing knowledge, and attend to deeper questions raised by the text rather than just its surface features.

Whether or not we can raise the curiosity levels of our societies depends on several factors, including our education systems, child-rearing practices, teaching styles, and social attitudes. One of the things it depends on most is how we use the internet.

If Vannevar Bush, prophet of the world wide web, had been allowed to drop in on the twenty-first century he may have been simultaneously excited and disappointed. A user of the social news and discussion site Reddit recently posted the following question: ‘If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared today, what would be the most difficult thing to explain to them about today?’ The most popular answer was this one:

I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.

The term ‘digital divide’ emerged in the 1990s to describe the technology’s haves and have-nots; those who could benefit from the educational benefits of the internet and those excluded from them. It inspired efforts to spread access as widely as possible, particularly to low-income families, and, partly as a result, the divide has narrowed. But increased access to the internet isn’t, in itself, a social good; what matters is how it is used. As Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft, puts it, the spread of internet access ‘mirrors and magnifies existing problems we’ve been ignoring’. Foremost among them is that not everyone is interested in exercising their epistemic curiosity.

The Kaiser Foundation, a US think-tank, has been surveying the media habits of Americans for over a decade, and it has found that American children now spend at least ten hours a day with digital devices, an increase of over fifty per cent since 1999. The poorer a household is, the more time its children spend glued to a device; according to the Kaiser study, children and teenagers whose parents do not have a college degree spent ninety minutes more per day exposed to media than children from higher socioeconomic families. This divide is widening; in 1999, the difference was just sixteen minutes. It turns out that when most people get their hands on a computer, rather than pursue their curiosity what they want to do is play Angry Birds. ‘Despite the educational potential of computers, the reality is that their use for education . . . is minuscule compared to their use for pure entertainment,’ said Vicky Rideout, author of the study. ‘Instead of closing the achievement gap, they’re widening the time-wasting gap.’

Another US study, this one a survey of teachers carried out by Pew Research, found that ninety per cent of teachers agreed that digital technologies were creating ‘an easily distracted generation with short attention spans’. Three out of four teachers surveyed said that they believed students had been conditioned by the internet to find quick answers. In interviews with researchers from Common Sense Media, teachers described the ‘Wikipedia problem’ — students are so used to finding answers within a few clicks that they balk at the hard work of investigating problems which don’t yield answers quickly. As one high school teacher said of her pupils: ‘They need skills that are different than ‘Spit, spit, there’s the answer.’

The only sensible answer to the question, ‘Is the internet making us stupid or more intelligent?’ is ‘Yes’. The internet presents us with more opportunities to learn than ever before, and also allows us not to bother. It is a boon to those with a desire to deepen their understanding of the world, and also to those who are only too glad not to have to make the effort. If you want to watch the black-spotted puffer fish in its natural habitat, examine a Gutenberg Bible or discover who invented the paper clip, then you can do so on the web. Similarly, if you want to take courses in French, or art history, or share your epistemic enthusiasms, however obscure, with communities of people who are interested in the same things, you can.

But if you’re incurious — or, like most of us, a little lazy — then will you use the internet to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers. You will use it to get quick answers to questions that you might otherwise have to take your time over, think harder on and absorb more deeply as a result. The internet will effectively take over the functions normally performed by your instinct for enquiry. Your curiosity will be outsourced, and before you know it, you will forget how to practise it.

Rather than a great dumbing-down, it’s likely that we are at the beginning of a cognitive polarisation — a division into the curious and the incurious. People who are inclined to set off on intellectual adventures will have more opportunities to do so than ever in human history; people who merely seek quick answers to someone else’s questions will fall out of the habit of asking their own, or never learn it in the first place. In the blunt formulation of the writer Kevin Drum, ‘The internet is making smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.’

As this cognitive divide develops, it will feed into and exacerbate existing socioeconomic inequality, via the education system. Parental discipline and good teachers will help get pupils through high school and into college, but their progress will be supercharged by an intrinsic desire to learn. Our education systems appear to be failing to inculcate this desire, particularly at the higher level. In the US, the Wabash National Study tracks the progress of 2,200 students during their four years at college. The students complete an array of surveys and tests at three points — when they first arrive on campus, at the end of their first year, and at the end of their fourth year. The survey’s most striking finding is that academic motivation declines steeply over the first year at college — and never recovers.

At the same time, US colleges are demanding less of their students than they used to. Perhaps as a result, students are getting lazier. In 1961, students spent an average of twenty-four hours a week studying. Today’s students spend a little more than half that time. The educationalists Richard Keeling and Richard Hersh argue that colleges and universities increasingly see themselves passively, as ‘a kind of bank with intellectual assets that are available to students’. It’s a state of affairs that will only worsen the curiosity divide, because it means that curious students will succeed disproportionately versus the incurious.

Traditional universities are increasingly vulnerable to competition from online providers of education, like Coursera and the Khan Academy. Established institutions like Harvard and Yale are also offering MOOCs (massive open online courses). For students who know what they want, MOOCs provide an attractive low-cost option. But to get the most out of a MOOC, even more so than at a bricks-and-mortar university, you need to be a good self-motivator — and the best motivator of learning is epistemic curiosity. Without the incentive of wanting to get the most out of a big financial investment, or the daily encouragement of real-life meetings with students and teachers, the MOOC student is thrown back on her inner desire to learn. Unless it is unusually high, she may find it hard to stay the course. According to the New York Times, ‘less than 10 per cent of MOOC students finish the courses they sign up for on their own.’

We live in a world in which the competition for jobs is getting fiercer than ever as the global labour force expands, while smart machines take over more of the tasks that were once the exclusive province of humans. Meanwhile, the internet extends the opportunity to learn to people who previously didn’t have it. The combination of these factors will reward curiosity and penalise incuriosity on a global scale, because curiosity is such a great motivator to learn. Here’s an extract from an interview with the economist Tyler Cowen about his 2013 book, Average Is Over:

The more information that’s out there, the greater the returns to just being willing to sit down and apply yourself . . . So if you’re an individual, say from China or India, and you’re really smart and motivated, you’re going to do much better in this new world than say 10 or 20 years ago. But there are a lot of people in the wealthier countries, I wouldn’t describe them as lazy, but they’re not super motivated. They think they can more or less get by. I think in relative terms those people are already starting to see lower wages because they’re not quite the prize commodities they think they are.

John Dewey, the American philosopher and educationalist, writing in 1910, proposed three stages of curiosity. The first is the child’s hunger to explore and probe its surroundings — it is instinctual rather than intellectual. In the second, curiosity becomes more social, as children realise that other people are useful sources of information about the world, and begin asking an endless series of ‘why’ questions; the specific questions themselves aren’t as important as the habit of gathering and assimilating information. In the third stage, curiosity is ‘transformed into interest in problems provoked by the observation of things and the accumulation of material’. In this final stage, curiosity becomes a force that deepens the bond between the individual and the world, adding layers of interest, complexity and delight to her experience.

John Dewey didn’t think everyone would reach this third stage. He regarded curiosity as a fragile quality, which required a constant effort to maintain:

In a few people, intellectual curiosity is so insatiable that nothing will discourage it, but in most its edge is easily dulled and blunted . . . Some lose it in indifference or carelessness; others in a frivolous flippancy; many escape those evils only to become incased in a hard dogmatism which is equally fatal to the spirit of wonder.

It is easy to blame the internet for making us stupid. But the only person or thing that can make you stupid, or incurious, is you. Those who are tempted to use the web as a way of avoiding intellectual effort may forget how to be curious at all. Those who use it as a springboard to sustained intellectual explorations are likely to achieve more at school and university and to reap increasingly higher rewards at work. The future belongs to those who choose curiosity.

22 Conscientiousness is largely independent of intelligence, although there is some evidence that less able individuals sometimes become more conscientious to compensate for lower levels of ability, while very intelligent individuals are tempted to ‘coast’.