The Power of Curiosity to Overcome the Limits of Cognitive Bias
“Curiosity is essential for progress. Only when we look to worlds beyond our own can we really know if there’s room for improvement.” Simon Sinek
We must teach, learn, and live with curiosity for our community to thrive.
Our brains are sense-making organs housed in the dark, black, recesses of our skull. The brain takes in information gained from the senses and processes it via electrical charges and pathways. While the brain is amazing in its abilities, it has limitations in the form of shortcuts called cognitive biases.
Processing large amounts of input makes these shortcuts necessary for the brain on a system level, but unchecked these biases have serious negative consequences to society. They can support creating divisions among others, leading people to jump to conclusions, and causing perpetuation of ignorance.
As teachers, parents, and community members we must embrace, practice, and model curiosity as the superpower that it is in order to overcome cognitive bias and create thriving learning environments that promote critical thinking, appreciation of differences, and the ability to adapt and change.
Here are three important cognitive biases to be aware of and examples of how getting curious can help overcome them.
1. Confirmation Bias is our brain’s inclination to pay attention and interpret information in a way that supports our current thinking. Social media feeds this further by curating the content we see based on things like page views, data tracking, and likes. Without regular exposure to different viewpoints, it’s easy to get complacent and increasingly difficult to practice objective reasoning—a key component of critical thinking. Confirmation bias can increase polarization and decreases the ability to understand and entertain different ideas.
Get Curious: Have diverse conversations with diverse people. Try to understand an opposing viewpoint in order to think more deeply. This can help you get a cleared, multi-dimensional view of an issue. With the multitude of information available, it is necessary to seek out information from multiple sources; as well as consider the source’s motivation.
Personal Connection: I am not a fan of Standardized Testing. I believe it is especially bad practice to center funding, assessment of teacher quality, and student ability on high stakes testing that take place on a single day in a stressful atmosphere (complete silence for hours is difficult and uncomfortable for most elementary school kids). Most of the articles I read and the people I talk to have similar sentiments about it, so I decided to do some reading from the opposing viewpoint. What I discovered is how the use of standardized test data helps illuminate disparities in education and can be necessary for identifying and ultimately providing help for those who need it. While I still believe that there is a long way to go in terms of the way we do and use standardized tests, I now understand how gathering this data is important for social justice and can help lead to improvements in education.
2. Actor-Observer Bias is our tendency to base our own actions on external factors, but when it comes to other people’s actions, we tend to base those on internal factors. If we think that way as teachers, the student that doesn’t turn in his homework is automatically lazy or the co-worker that blows us off is just rude. This tendency has a huge negative impact on trust and compassion. Talk about unfair!
Get Curious Before jumping to judgment, ask. A genuine question asking “Why,” can go a long way. Take time to assess possible external factors that could influence the behavior and actions of others, it will help you overcome the rush to judgment and can improve the communication in your relationship.
Personal Connection: A fourth grader in my class was becoming defiant and rude to others in the building. I found myself starting to jump to the assumption that he just didn’t care. But instead, I stopped and got curious. I explained to him that I noticed he had starting to treat other adults and students in the building with disrespect and asked him what was going on. He explained how he has noticed his reactions have been off and that his emotions are “seeming to get bigger.” It was then I realized that hormones were starting to get to him. Knowing this, I’m able to be more patient and help him with strategies for calming himself down before reacting, rather than writing him off as a kid that “Just doesn’t care.”
3. Status-Quo Bias is the brain’s tendency to view any type of change as loss, leading people to desire instead to keep things the way they are. This encourages sticking with the familiar rather than choosing something that could actually be better. This bias has the potential to stall progress while also perpetuating inaction. We must be aware of this bias if we are going to rise to the growing challenges of our current world.
Get Curious: Instead of digging in your heels on what you’ve always done, take time to look at information objectively, think about possible risks and benefits. Talk with others who have experience with the decision you’re faced with and gain more perspective before refusing to budge. Our world is changing whether we choose to accept it or not and our world needs us to change too in order to solve some seriously pressing challenges.
Personal Connection: If I’m being honest, the growth of Artificial Intelligence is kind of terrifying to me. When I was learning about ChatGPT (generative pre-trained transformer) from a colleague my first reaction was “No way!” ChatGPT generates human-like responses to prompts. For example, you can type in “Create an essay about Charles Dickens,” it generates it right in front of you. My first thoughts were about the implications of plagiarism and loss of jobs that could come if AI can just write everything for us. But, when I started to get curious about the potential it had, I started to realize how it could be a powerful tool. Examples and practice questions can be generated quickly to help students in the moment leaving humans to be able to spend more time working to refine, integrate, and build on frameworks. Time consuming paperwork could be completed quicker so focus can be more on human interaction and deeper connections. I am willing to be more open and embrace the change (but I am not letting it write my blog posts).
Understanding that our brains are limited by cognitive biases is important to help us understand why taking the time to get curious is so important. Asking questions and thinking critically are necessary to overcome the potentially negative effects if these mental shortcuts go unchecked. Getting curious helps us better understand multiple perspectives, practice thoughtful communication, and embrace the necessary change in order to learn, grow, and thrive together.
