Goal

To innovate our way out of global problems, we need curious people and cultures that value curiosity. Our project asks whether we can promote, sustain, and diffuse a Culture of Curiosity, where people begin sentences with "I wonder…."
Curiosity is thought of as a characteristic (e.g., novelty) or a function of personality, but curiosity as a cultural phenomenon, and its encouraging effects, have received inadequate attention.
We explore how curiosity, as an expression of human flourishing, can be induced, sustained, and promoted among students, their social networks, and in the broader society. Our long-term goal is to create a climate where raising "why" and "how" questions is valued as much as, if not more than, finding answers.
Promoting curiosity, we believe, can also flatten social hierarchies based along traditional gender and class lines. Our hypothesis is that, when we value and nourish inquiry, humanity will flourish.
Working with Nepali schools, often characterized by caste- and gender-based hierarchies, we explore curiosity's impact at multiple levels – from its neurological trace as manifest in the brain, to effects on family and social networks, to assessing how curious leaders affect society at large. Similar efforts could then diffuse to other countries.

Opportunity

Curiosity has been conceptualized at the individual level as both a personality "trait" and a more transient "state," but little is known about how curiosity can be induced among different personality types. Using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), we will contribute to this understanding by documenting what happens in the brain (particularly in the prefrontal cortex) when curiosity is aroused situationally in individuals with varying levels of trait curiosity. Subsequently, we will assess the effects of heightened curiosity on individuals, their social networks, and larger societal groups to which they belong to assess whether curiosity has broader impact.

Roadblocks

Our idea, that curiosity's impact will be positive in the long run, assumes curiosity itself can be improved. A significant roadblock could be that curiosity is only a personality-driven phenomenon (which, by definition would remain unchangeable). If so, its impact on society would remain attenuated.
Another potential roadblock is that the value of curiosity learned in school may get diluted or remain inconsequential when students interact with the outside world, where traditional norms prevail.
Finally, a third roadblock is that schools, including teachers, would be resistant to changing their value system.

Breakthroughs Needed

Rigorous assessment techniques are needed to measure and monitor curiosity. If it is not changing at the desired pace, we will modify our approach through adaptive learning methods; identify and provide leadership skills to students exhibiting high levels of curiosity so that they influence more of their peers and their own curiosity is sustained; and provide rapid and sustained feedback to school administrations about what is working and what is not. We will spend extensive time building relationships and conducting research to understand what will be acceptable within the education and social structures.
School-induced curiosity remaining at odds against the static external world is a real possibility. But it only highlights the idea that raising curious individuals cannot be done in a social vacuum; rather, it needs to be coupled with the schools to enhance leadership skills that help students take on an ambassadorial role.
Because school buy-in is critical, our engagement with the schools and other stakeholders (parents, community leaders, employers), will start from the beginning, continuing throughout the project's duration. We anticipate spending a good portion of the first year in collaborative discussions with stakeholders to engage all parties in learning through continuous inquiry.

Key Indicators of Success

Y3: We will assess school curriculum changes each year, expecting a more dynamic and adaptive curriculum in treatment schools. Teacher unease at the beginning will likely also have dissipated over time. We also anticipate greater self-efficacy (among treatment-school teachers) to teach according to the new curriculum, and student improvements in curiosity scores. We will test improvements through existing curiosity scales and neural measurements (that we introduce and validate).
After rolling out the program to either one or two other domains (Y5), we expect similar improvements in trainees across all domains (Y10).
Indications of failure: curiosity remains unchanged; adoption is low.

Additional Information

The dual-component curiosity model, which includes both state and trait dimensions (Loewenstein, 1994), leads to the idea that curiosity can be improved and that its change profile may differ by personality: curious individuals may react to curiosity-arousing stimuli differently than their less curious counterparts. Using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), we can map this sort of distinction with patterns of human brain activity, as has been done through fMRI (Jepma et al., 2012), including establishing how different stimuli properties affect the magnitude and duration of curiosity and its effects.
A brain region of potential interest is the prefrontal cortex (Doi et al. 2013), involved in working memory and mental manipulation. Augmenting this neural approach with eye tracking technology allows us to also model information-seeking (i.e., curiosity driven learning). This dual approach further permits us to consider how intrinsic motivation may arise from curiosity-arousing stimuli (Domenico et al. 2017).
In Year 1, we will use and contribute to this knowledge at the micro level; adopt methods to improve student curiosity (Pluck & Johnson, 2011) through curriculum development at the macro level (Lindholm, 2018); engage stakeholders in charting our path; and adaptively test and improve our intervention. By the end of Year 2, we will have implemented the intervention in two schools, with three others coming on board in Year 3.
The overall design of the study is a quasi-experiment in which we randomly select 10 primary schools from a pool of approximately 50 that are willing to participate, pair them according to student socioeconomic and ethnicity profile, and randomly assign one from each pair to treatment or control arms. In order not to withhold treatment and to maximize school participation, control groups will switch over to treatment status after data collection is completed. We will assess student curiosity and learning motivation scores at baseline and annually thereafter. In addition, teachers and administrators will be queried through qualitative interviews, and curriculum and learning procedures will be assessed by third-party observers blinded to the study arm. If successful, we will expand this program to another domain (for example, training journalists or policymakers in curiosity) and we will undertake similar assessments by Year 5. By Year 10, we hope to expand this model to other domains, including the civil society and institutes of higher education.
Our team comprises experts in behavior and neuroscience (Johns Hopkins University); gender and women's studies (George Washington University); development (Kathmandu University); research, implementation and evaluation (Nepal Evaluation and Assessment Team); and Nepal public policy (vRock & Company).
We chose Nepal not only because of the cultural hierarchy and gender inequities we hope to address, but also because our ongoing work, professional network, and prior experience will faclitate our start-up efforts. Findings from our study, we hope, will also be applicable to other countries in Asia and beyond.
References
Di Domenico & Ryan (2017). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00145
Jepma et al. (2012). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2012.00005
Doi et al. (2013). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00770
Jepma et al. (2012). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2012.00005
Loewenstein (1994). https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.75
Pluck, Johnson (2011). ISSN 1512-1801