What Kind of Curious Are You?
Curiosity is five different things, and most people have two of them
Calling someone curious says almost nothing. The pleasure of learning something new, the itch of not knowing, the willingness to feel lost, the interest in what other people are up to and the appetite for risk are five separate traits that barely predict each other. Someone can be deeply curious about ideas and completely incurious about people. This test scores all five.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about the last year or so. Curiosity fluctuates with how much room your life has in it, and a bad year is not a personality.
What it measures
Five dimensions: joyous exploration, the pleasure of finding things out; deprivation sensitivity, the discomfort of a gap in your knowledge; stress tolerance, your willingness to put up with feeling lost while you learn; social curiosity, your interest in what other people think and do; and thrill seeking, the appetite for physical or social risk.
Based on: Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale (Kashdan et al., 2018)
Possible results
Joyous exploration
Learning as a pleasure rather than a task.
Deprivation sensitivity
The itch of an unanswered question.
Stress tolerance
Whether you can bear feeling lost long enough to learn.
Social curiosity
Wanting to know what other people think and do.
Thrill seeking
Appetite for risk as a way of feeling alive.
Common questions
Why is my curiosity so uneven across the five?
Because that is the normal shape. The whole point of the five-dimensional model is that these traits do not move together: a person can be relentless about ideas and indifferent to people, or fascinated by people and unwilling to risk anything. An even profile across all five would be the unusual result.
Which dimension is worth improving?
Stress tolerance, almost always. Wanting to know things is rarely the bottleneck; being willing to be bad at something for a few weeks usually is. It is also the most trainable of the five, because tolerance for feeling lost grows mainly through having survived feeling lost.
Is curiosity actually good for you?
Joyous exploration is the dimension most consistently linked to wellbeing. Deprivation sensitivity is a different story - it drives achievement and it also carries tension, and a high score there with a low stress tolerance score is the combination most likely to feel like being chased by your own questions.
Sources
- Kashdan, T. B., Stiksma, M. C., Disabato, D. J., McKnight, P. E., Bekier, J., Kaji, J., & Lazarus, R. (2018). The five-dimensional curiosity scale: Capturing the bandwidth of curiosity and identifying four unique subgroups of curious people. Journal of Research in Personality.
- Kashdan, T. B., Disabato, D. J., Goodman, F. R., & McKnight, P. E. (2020). The Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale Revised (5DCR): Briefer subscales while separating overt and covert social curiosity. Personality and Individual Differences.
An honest note The five dimensions are well supported and clearly distinguishable from each other. The part to hold loosely is the idea of curiosity types: the original paper does describe four subgroups of curious people, but grouping people into types from continuous scores is always a simplification, and your five separate scores carry more information than any label would. Note also that thrill seeking is the odd one out - it sits closer to sensation seeking than to the other four.