Cognitive Bias 6 out of 25: Curiosity Tendency


Curiosity might be the biggest reasons why humans have evolved so much. It is known that humans are the most curious beings, even more so than other mammals like monkeys. Curiosity can cause us to do so many wonderful things as well as bad things. I believe this is so prevalent in our DNA because we want to know how things work, what they are like, and how we like them. The human and customer experience is becoming more and more popular. I think that people need to be more curious at times. We get in our routines, homes, and networks and stop venturing out to meet new people and try new things. Personally, I like the idea of new and exciting things.

Hopefully by now we all heard the term curiosity killed the fish… or something like that at least. I don’t really agree with this term. Curiosity can be used for so many wonderful things. It’s as simple as being smart and not making stupid decisions (more on one of the reasons why we make stupid decisions here). Curiosity is why entrepreneurship and the digital age has come to be. All it took was for someone like Elon Musk to come along and wonder why no one has created a luxury electric car and then go and do it. That is so cool to me!

Where Curiosity Can Ruin Your Life

Curiosity has so many positives that can come from it but also has some outcomes that are negative. I think the most dangerous one is the use of drugs. Most of the time, the reason someone ever first picked up the weed or snorted a line of coke was curiosity. We ask, what does it feel like to try this? All it takes is one time for you to get hooked for life. This is where it is best to avoid certain things completely. Understand the negative effects that something can have on you before doing it. Other ones to look out for might include cheating, stealing, self-harm, bullying, etc.

The most common one that most people fall victim to is social media. I tell you what those social media developers for Facebook are geniuses. They have developed Facebook in a way to recapture out attention with the feed. Even notice that once you scroll back to the top of your feed that it will change all the posts? This is engineered to turn us into curiosity zombies that want more. It gets me all the time. Recently, I have been forcing myself to not be on social so much because it’s such a time waster. Facebook is the best with taking advantage of our curiosity but Twitter and Insta hold their own as well.

Remember that curiosity is not bad and you don’t need to fear it. Have the self-discipline to stop yourself from making poor decisions. You can become extremely successful in life if you are constantly curious. Use it for your own personal benefit and abuse it for good reasons.

Watch out for other cognitive biases here with my posts on 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Please comment your thoughts on the curiosity tendency! Have you ever fallen victim to this before? If you like this post please subscribe to my blog or share!

Be great!

-Cody

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