164 - Susan Engel: Do We Become Less Curious As We Grow Older?

0:00Welcome back to the Stanford Psychology Podcast. I'm Adani, and for this week's episode, I had the pleasure of chatting with Susan Engel. Susan is a senior lecturer and senior faculty fellow at Williams College. She completed her PhD in developmental psychology at the City University of New York and has conducted decades of research on multiple topics, particularly children's curiosity and their intellectual lives. Susan has also written numerous books, including the book The Intellectual Lives of Children, which we talk about in this conversation. This conversation was a true joy and honor for me because Susan's research and writing have shaped my thinking on these topics in many ways.

0:45I hope you will enjoy it too. Without further ado, here's our conversation.

1:16Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, Susan. It's great to have you here today. Totally my pleasure. So I'm really excited we get to talk because you work on a lot of different topics that I think are of broad interest to people. So some of the things you study include curiosity and surprise and just learning and how children see the world and experience the world and then how that sort of continues on until we become adults and do a lot of other different things. And one of the things I wanted to start with is in your book, The Intellectual Lives of Children, that we can talk more as we go through this conversation.

1:45you describe how children are often very persistent and dogged in their pursuit of more information on a particular topic that interests them. Like it could be bugs or it could be the universe, whatever it is. And if I understand it correctly, the early model you had was that curiosity is momentary. So it's incited by something that was happening in a given moment and then you become curious about it. And then later you found that maybe it's a more persistent state. After all this work you've done over the decades, what do you find now? Is curiosity momentary? Is it lasting? Is that a false binary?

2:19What is curiosity and how should we think about it? You ended with a really huge question. Let me see if I can unravel that. So let me start with the last question. What curiosity is, I would broadly say, but it's very broad. It's the urge

2:39to know what you don't know. And the reason I put it that way is I used to say all the time, the trouble is we in educational settings, we value knowing so much. We don't give students a sense of pleasure in not knowing. And curiosity is all about embracing what you don't know. And then I realized that's not quite true because that could be taken to mean curiosity is about embracing your ignorance. And it's not that. It's the motivation to close the information gap, which is how others have described it. Loewenstein, for instance. And what's interesting to me about that and what has provoked so much of my research is that that requires knowing what you don't know.

3:19And that's a very complicated intellectual accomplishment. So now I can go back to the question, what is curiosity? Well, I'll just say one more thing about that. there's a broad definition that's interesting and useful if you're writing a book or you're describing your program of research to a funder or whatever but when it comes down to doing precise research it doesn't matter what your broad definition of curiosity is it matters how you're operationalizing it in a study is it asking a question is it turning over rocks on the ground Is it something that takes place in 15 minutes or two hours?

3:55So at the end of the day, to some degree, amongst researchers, it's how you define it for that research purpose. And so the broad definition is useful as a sort of general guideline, but it doesn't direct you for the particular investigation you want to do. So I can return to that. But so wanting to know what you don't know, I would say, is my definition of curiosity. But then you started with this specific comment that early on, I thought of curiosity as a momentary thing. Kid sees something in their cup at the breakfast table that they've never seen before. Chocolate milk. Oh, my goodness. What is that?

4:36And then they do something to find out. They look more closely. They ask. They touch it. They taste it. Those are all ways to satisfy their curiosity. And that's true. That happens, well, not in a second, not from the researcher's point of view, but in a very short period of time. And it's true that as I studied curiosity, I became more and more fascinated by how often it was sustained over time. And I felt the traditional experimental methods had prevented us from noticing that. And again, I can go back to that and talk more about it. But I would say in terms of my own definition of curiosity, it didn't change.

5:17Two things happened. I realized that most of the research had led most of us to think of it as a momentary thing. Because in a lab, that's where you capture it. But in fact, in everyday experience, it's often not a momentary thing. And you just have to notice people in everyday life, notice your own experience or the experience of others. to realize that is so. And in fact, in The Intellectual Lives of Children, I talk about the way in which actually the more you know about something, the more you want to know, but what you want to know is often at a deeper and or more abstract level. So take Addy in the book.

6:00At first, it's just a leaf and then another leaf. Are these the same or is these different? Over time, that became a very both deep and yet also simultaneously often abstract interest in how things evolve and how things are the way they are in the natural world. So I didn't change my definition. I became interested in an unexplored, curious about an unexplored aspect of the phenomenon, an unidentified part. And in becoming interested in that, I realized that was a really interesting developmental process. Because it's true, the infant is always, you could say, passive about their curiosity. They respond to novelty.

6:47They explore novelty. That's the first form of curiosity. But it's only novelty that's presented to them that just happens. Someone new walks into the room. An unexpected shape shows up on the screen. An animal makes an unexpected noise and they want to know more. As you get older, particularly once you can operate in the world, handle things, grab things, and then even exponentially more so when you can talk, you can generate your own source of curiosity so imagine when you can do thought experiments which we now know begin to emerge as early as the third year of life where well let's just say children are capable of benefiting from their from a thought experiment when they're put in a situation where they can engage one then you can begin to think of questions that have never appeared in the world around you based by drawing on different kinds of knowledge.

7:46So you can say, and wonder what would happen if a bug evolved not to have wings. Now, no one showed you the bug. I'm thinking here of, let's say, a ladybug, or I wrote about potato bugs in my book about curia. That's something a child could wonder about without ever experiencing it. So it's not only that curiosity can be a more sustained process, at the same time, it can become self-generated. Two things I would love to pull on a bit more. One is you mentioned that we can think of curiosity as the urge to know what you don't know. And so there is an element of humility in there. Is it the case that children are just especially humble, given that they seem so curious?

8:30Because sometimes what we see is that children feel like they know a lot and have a lot of confidence that they can do things and that they're already very knowledgeable and able of things. Before we go there, do you want to give us a brief outline of what you were looking to do with your book for people who aren't familiar with it? Yes, sure. Yes. So let me go back and say that long before that, I had become interested in curiosity. I can talk about why at some point, but I don't have to. It led me eventually to write a book about the emergence of curiosity in young children, And that was called The Hungry Mind.

9:04And during while I was collecting data for that and thinking about that and looking at studies in order to write that book, but particularly when I was collecting data in open-ended circumstances at children's place, daycare centers and nursery schools, so not in the lab, I noticed I did what many researchers I think in my shoes would have done. And I thought, well, to see them being curious, I have to watch them play. I'm not going to see it necessarily when they're doing lessons, let's say in kindergarten. And I might not see it as much when they're eating lunch or lining up for the playground.

9:40But if I watch them when they're doing what they want to be doing, that's where I'm going to see curiosity. So I watched kids play a lot. And my students did lots of studies that involved watching kids play. And like every researcher, we had to decide what to include in our data, like what counted as an episode of curiosity. or exploration as we often called it. And we began to notice that kids weren't always exploring when they were playing. They were often doing this other thing. They were putting things together. They were attaching things. They were making things work and using things in a way that they weren't meant to be used for.

10:15A pencil became, you know, a tower or a weapon. And so I realized that when kids weren't exploring or inquiring, they were inventing. and that they are engaged in a lot of invention and that it goes hand in hand with curiosity. So you inquire and you invent. And I realized that they went together in my head. After it occurred to me that they went together, I thought, so do they go together? What do they go together for? Why would these two processes go together? And the answer became almost instantly clear to me, they're the two sides of having ideas. So whenever you develop an idea, you draw on these two mental processes, your curiosity, your need for information that you turn into knowledge, and your ability, and sometimes your need to put things together in a new way or to use things in a different way than they've been used before to solve problems.

11:17So you're trying to explain phenomena and solve problems. And that that's the basis of all, I would argue, of all our ideas. And obviously at some point, one has to think, so what kind of problems are kids solving? And that goes back to what you said at the beginning about the universe, did you say, that I had suggested. So you could be solving problems or gathering information about bugs. And you also could be exploring and solving problems about very big things, justice, the universe, infinity. And you're a student at Stanford, right? So just think of the different disciplines that are represented in the university.

12:10Probably most faculty there think in one way or another Their job is to pursue ideas and help students pursue ideas. And many of those ideas are based on a curiosity that's about abstract things and a question, a problem we are trying to solve that's fairly abstract. But then some of them are trying to solve very concrete problems. How do you solve this disease? How do we diminish the pervasiveness of hunger? You know, how do we feed more people? How do we clean the ocean? So those are very concrete problems, although they may involve abstract thinking. That's a whole other topic. So I would say that the book, The Intellectual Lives of Children, was my attempt to show the developmental trajectory by which curiosity develops, invention develops, and how they come together at a certain point to be the sort of fundamental tools of pursuing ideas.

13:07And I also wanted to show that children begin to pursue ideas at a very early age, much earlier than we had given children credit for. And some of those ideas are very concrete and useful in the world of the child anyway, but some of them are very abstract. And I wanted to lay that out and convince people that was so. yeah i think it's such a nice picture you painted and i actually i don't think i've ever heard it put that way before with those two components of curiosity and invention one thing that's on my mind here since you also talked about the developmental trajectory and and you mentioned that there are lots of adults and people at universities who still try to solve problems and so forth one story that listeners may have encountered for example in the media or just going through school themselves is that as people grow up as they go through school and just spend more time during life, sometimes it can seem like people's desire to learn and invent and do things and try things decline.

14:04At the same time, as you say, we do have lots of people who are eagerly trying to solve problems and they're trying to invent and do things still as adults. And then you also see children doing a lot of inventive things while they're young. As you said, way younger than we might have expected or thought of before. Is it true that curiosity and invention declines? Are children the most curious and most inventive? Or how do we make sense of all that? Oh, my goodness. If I could spend my whole lifetime, oops, I am trying to understand that question. I would say that, so I think most people who study curiosity, I think, would probably agree with me that at least from all the external behavioral evidence we have so far, there's less evidence that people feel curiosity at the same intensity or frequency when they're older than they do when they're young.

14:56And there's some evidence, actually wonderful evidence, that even in middle school, kids already don't think of school as a place to feel curious. So I think curiosity does wane over time. I think some of that's inevitable. So no one could be as curious as a two-year-old because you, first of all, you don't need to be because the more that's unexpected, you know, if you've read any of my work, I say this so much people must be sick of hearing it. The more that the world around you becomes familiar, the less provocations there are to find out. So curiosity is the great engine of learning, and that's very apparent in infancy and toddlerhood.

15:36Everything's unexpected, and the child is just amazingly motivated to reduce uncertainty, to make the unfamiliar familiar. They have to learn that dogs are not an exotic, scary new thing at the door, and that chocolate milk is just as predictable as orange juice or whatever. And so you could argue that you couldn't go on being that curious. You'd be too exhausted and you'd never get to do anything. But I would argue at the same time that some decreased, well, I would say two things. One is, on the other hand, and some listeners might think this is them, that you get less curious about everything, but you become even more curious about some things.

16:20So there are some things each of us probably could say that we're inexhaustibly curious about. For me, there are certain things I can never hear enough about food and cooking. I do it forever or how people write fiction or how children's minds develop. Those are my and my kids. Those are the things I'm endlessly curious about. Everybody has their own list. But there are individual differences. So not every grown-up is as curious as every other grown-up. Even though none of us are as omnivorous and perpetually voracious as the two-year-old, there are strong individual differences. And we have evidence for that, too.

17:03There are two things we don't have enough evidence for yet. And this is an invitation for people to do more on these things. Wonderful. One is we actually don't know whether there's a critical period for becoming very curious in the way that maybe listeners to a podcast like this consider themselves. I consider myself a pretty curious person. And we don't know whether becoming that kind of person, whether opportunity ends at a certain time. So when I give talks about this in other parts of the world, particularly, but also in the United States, I often some college professor will come up to me and say, do you think it's too late for my students?

17:43Meaning they don't seem curious. Could we still make them curious? And, you know, I'm a college teacher. I always feel, yes, I'm going to make them more curious or more curious about my topic. But we don't actually have any evidence that shows that if your curiosity is quashed when you're little, it's over for you. Is the word squashed, squashed, whatever? No. And we don't know if there's a point at which it's too late to bring it back. So that's one line of research that we actually really need that we don't have. and i like to think i don't know if this is the most encouraging example but i think i struggled a lot with staying curious as i went through school just through k-12 education and i kind of found it again i don't know if that's just in my head or if that's a true way in which things played out but maybe that's some anecdote why'd you go to grade for school interesting well there's a long answer and a short answer i think for me it really was that I wanted to learn more about how minds and brains work.

18:51And there are many ways to do that. You don't necessarily need to go to graduate school, but I really liked studying those from a scientific standpoint, right? And so graduate school seemed like a great place for it, even though not the only place. One question on my mind right now is, you mentioned there are a few things we don't know, one of them being whether there is a critical period for developing and fostering deep curiosity. How would we go about running research studies to find an answer to that? How do studies like that work? How do we conduct research on this? Answering that will make it obvious why it hasn't been done yet.

19:26So the quick answer is you probably know better than I. I just have to stop and say, I think you must be curious or you wouldn't have gone to graduate school because as you say, there are easier ways to find out what you want to find out. but you really wanted to find out for yourself. So you must have liked the way it felt to know what you didn't yet know. That was just why I wanted to make it clear. So the answer to your question, how could we go about studying that, is partly from longitudinal data. The problem is that kind of longitudinal data would be very hard to collect. So I suppose one thing would be just very simply to show how stable curiosity is over time.

20:10in the individual. Because I suppose even if that didn't help you answer what makes certain people more, because we assume individual differences and we know that from experiments. At any given time, age, there are individual differences in levels of curiosity and kinds of curiosity, but that's all cross-sectional data. So we don't know if a person who has low curiosity at five has low curiosity at 15. So I suppose one way to do this would be to study it longitudinally. That would not tell you, obviously, anything about why some people are more curious than others. It might tell you it doesn't change, but you might think that's because people's environments don't change.

20:50Or because, you know, it's like the old work by Sandra Skarr, who I don't know if people read her work anymore, but you seek out what confirms the style you were raised to have intellectually. I was just looking at something. I think it was on Instagram earlier, a photograph of Marie Curie and her husband who also won the Nobel Prize and their baby daughter who grew up to win the Nobel Prize also for a scientific discovery. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, my God. So it's easy to say, well, because they were all so smart. And then that little girl, I forget her name, grew up to feel that science was the right domain in which to use your smarts.

21:29All of that may be true. But it may also be true that she grew up realizing that you could ask questions about the natural world and answer them, as you said, by scientific means. So you could do the longitudinal study just to find out if curiosity is stable without trying to make any claims that you wouldn't be entitled to make about whether that was inherent or environmental. or we already have pretty good evidence that schools diminish curiosity. And what we don't have enough evidence of, what exactly is making that happen? We don't have any causal evidence about that. We can make interpretations about what it is sort of indirectly through the data we have.

22:14But so that's a part of how we would answer it with longitudinal data showing that it's stable. And then I suppose you, it's not my kind of research, but people do it. And it's been very valuable to all of us. You could find some feature of children's environment and see if that predicts something about their level of curiosity later. Again, it's an association, but it would be better than what we have now, which is anything about that. So it sounds like there are various ways of going about it. One way, as you mentioned, is following the same people continuously over a longer span of time. And some of the common challenges with that might be just finding the funds for it, also getting people to actually continuously participate or repeatedly participate in your study.

23:00What else is hard about doing these very involved longitudinal studies? That's an enormous amount of time. I'll tell you some other things in particular, and in a time, I just have to say it, when we're getting less and less support from anyone, anywhere for basic research. So, you know, I would have been more hopeful about this seven years ago. No, that's the wrong time period. Sorry. Twelve years ago or two years ago. Let me be clear. There are particular challenges. So curiosity is, this is why I love it so much. It's puzzling, to say the least. Because if you gave me a test of curiosity that involved cars, I would look very incurious.

23:44and if all your measures of curiosity were visual, I'd also be amazingly, I'd seem amazingly incurious. I'm visually, my husband's an artist and he notices everything everywhere. We come home from a party and I'll say, did you hear what that woman was saying to that other woman? And I'll say, what are you talking about? Did you see the way that corner of the wall was painted or, you know, the side of the window, what it looked out on? I'm like, what? So people are interested in different things. We know that. So obvious. But over time, your curiosity is sort of hitched to whether you get to pursue the things that interest you.

24:25It's one of the problems of school, maybe why someone like you found your curiosity a little bit flattened during school, because you may not have been able to pursue the things that made you most curious. The problem that poses for longitudinal data is you might find yourself comparing apples and oranges, number one. So you'd have to decide what makes my curiosity as a child about novels and gossip and overhearing grown-ups' conversations comparable to my husband's endless curiosity about the inanimate world when he was growing up. So it would be a question of measurement and definition, but also not every kid is exposed to the things that allow them to develop their curiosity.

25:14And that is not just a situational issue. That's not just how you measure it in the moment, like giving the kid or the grown-up the activity or the materials that are going to, you know, step on their curiosity nerve. It's also that if you didn't get exposed to the things that made you curious and you weren't given a chance to pursue them, you may at some point have lost the opportunity to know what it feels like to be deeply curious about something you're already knowledgeable about. So yeah, these two themes of the things that can diminish curiosity and the things that can maybe help foster it again later on or early on.

25:53I would love to dwell on that a little bit. You mentioned, for example, that you are really into food and cooking, right? And I I wonder what kinds of things have you found to be helpful fostering your own curiosity? Because as you say, it's not always necessarily the case or maybe often not the case that your environment presented with the opportunities and options to actually learn more about a given thing or do more as a given thing. So are there things we can do ourselves to foster our own curiosity? And what could those things be? And do we know anything from research about that? Oh, well, let me start with the research, which is more comfortable to me than what people can do for themselves.

26:29I'll tell you a personal story that might shed light. So research shows this is different kind of research, not actually related to curiosity. But we know that choice, agency and autonomy are really important for kids. This is what I'm working on now, actually. I'm very interested in why children engage in certain kinds of thinking when they're playing that they're reluctant to engage in when they're not playing and one of the things that's most baffling about being interested in research on play which I am is that it's very hard to do good lab research on something that kids ordinarily that its very essence is that you do it when you want it how you want it So you cannot make a child play.

27:22You could make the child go through the motions of playing. But if you watch them play on their own, autonomy and agency define it as an activity. So in the same way that you can't force someone to be curious about what they're not curious about, you can just give them opportunities and then help them get better to your point before at satisfying their curiosity. So here's an example in the realm of science education, which I feel very strongly about. We often teach it backwards. We teach them the stuff they should know, hoping that later they'll get curious about it. When, in fact, if you're curious about something, really curious, learning how to get better at answering your own questions just is as easy as a kid learning how to build a higher tower.

28:12Yeah. Which they want to do. So they learn how to do it. So and there's nothing new in my saying that's in the work from Piaget onward. But it never has been understood quite the way I think it could be understood in an educational setting. I don't think it was meant to be understood by educators then, but I think we could understand it that way now. and certainly we know from the labs of people like Elizabeth Bonowitz and Laura Schultz and Alison Gopnik, kids want to satisfy their curiosity and they are attracted to ambiguity. They're attracted to complexity. They willingly engage in counterfactual thinking, but you have to give them the right opportunity to do it.