胡迪尼的大象与好奇心

Curiosity has been almost universally praised by the workplace as an all-purpose virtue, yet some people insist on tallying up its costs.

The one keeping this account is Andrew Palmer, who writes a column under the name Bartleby in a long-established British weekly.

His conclusion is stated plainly: curiosity is inherently distracting — it makes people lose focus and pushes decisions that should be made further back.

Over the past few years, employers have treated curiosity as a superpower for coping with upheaval, with recruiting, evaluation and training all leaning on it.

Palmer does not deny this; he merely reminds us that superpowers are never free — someone always has to pay the bill.

The evidence supporting this fine reputation is indeed plentiful.

Sophie von Stumm of the University of York and her co-authors completed a meta-analysis.

The results found that intellectual curiosity can predict academic performance, and this link appears repeatedly across different studies.

Another study cited in the column shows that when people are eager to know an answer, they remember noticeably more.

In one experiment, participants were asked to guess how Houdini made an elephant disappear back in the day.

Those told they were very close but not correct came up with more new solutions afterward than those told they had answered correctly.

Companies learned long ago to harness this drive.

Google wrote only a math problem on a billboard with no identifying marks at all.

Those who could solve it followed the clues to a recruitment page; those who couldn't had no idea it was a recruitment ad.

Charitable fundraising has similar mechanisms.

One organization found that asking for 8.23 dollars made people more likely to open their wallets than asking for a round 10 dollars.

Spencer Harrison of INSEAD calls curiosity itself a productive inefficiency.

In his words, curiosity brings short-term detours again and again, and the payoff may only be realized long afterward.

In another study, people who chose which video to watch themselves were more curious about the subject than those assigned to watch the same video.

Stefan Thomke of Harvard Business School studies corporate experimentation culture; his example is the online booking platform Booking.com.

At Booking.com, roughly a thousand controlled experiments are running simultaneously at any given moment.

Palmer writes that to use curiosity well, one must accept trade-offs.

Some time is destined to be spent in dead ends, some experiments show no results for a long time, and the books don't look good.

He wrote at the end of his column that there is almost nothing bad about curiosity.

Then he added two words: almost.