Have you ever found yourself trying to learn something more than once in your life, with very different outcomes? This happened to me when I learned conflict resolution skills. 

Some years ago, I was in a desperate situation. My then-partner and I just had another bitter fight. I felt hurt, misunderstood and helpless. I wanted things to change and didn’t know how.

As a last ditch method, I bought a book on conflict de-escalation on Amazon and took extensive notes. Reading on and on, things started to click. I came up with a plan on how to start a conflict debrief with my partner. During the debrief conversation, I hung on to my scribbled agenda draft and talking points as if they were a life raft.

The textbook approach worked. We managed to talk out our perspectives and walk away with more empathy for each other. And over the coming years, we managed to have much less destructive fights (we still fought a lot, there is a reason we are ex-partners!). While I don’t remember the exact strategies anymore, I owe most of what I know about conflict resolution to this book and relationship.

But that was not the first time someone tried to teach me conflict resolution skills. Some 10 years earlier, I attended a super engaging workshop on this topic, led very knowledgeable and passionate facilitators. And yet, not a single idea n of the workshop stuck with me. If they had, I could have saved myself a lot of relationship pain 10 years later!

That experience kept me wondering: Why did I have such very different learning outcomes in those two situations, when I tried learning the same knowledge?

Curiosity is the missing piece

Recently I came across a scientific theory that answers this question, the Information Gap Theory of Curiosity by George Loewenstein. According to his paper from 1994, we become curious when we know something about a topic, but miss a crucial piece for a complete understanding. This “missing puzzle piece” is what Loewenstein calls the information gap. The desire to bridge the information gap is what makes us curious.

The famous story of Newton discovering the principle of gravity is a great example of this model. While he was sitting in his garden in England, he observed an apple falling from a tree. As maybe only physicists might, Newton found himself wondering why the apple fell straight from the tree, and not in any other direction. Why did it not fall straight up into the sky, or down in some kind of curve, or even stay in the air? That was the missing puzzle piece, or “information gap”, in Newton’s understanding of the mechanics of motion. With his curiosity aroused, he ended up formulating the law of universal gravitation to explain the apple’s trajectory.

What influences our curiosity?

To understand how we can become more curious, we can look at learning as a “treasure hunt”.

Imagine you are an adventurer in the late 1700s. The landlord kicked you out of your dingy bedroom because you’re late on the rent, and your pub next door won’t pour you any more gin on credit. You desperately need more money if you want to continue living it up!

Last night at the pub, some shady-looking person handed you an old map and talked you out of your last silver coins to buy it. They promised buried treasures… Unfortunately, as you look at the map sober (well, let’s be honest, with a huge hangover!), there are a few holes in the map that hinder your journey to untold riches. As your headache clears, it dawns on you that this will be quite a quest to pursue…

The parts of the map that you bought yesterday are your existing knowledge in the “information gap” model. Those pesky burned holes in the map represent your information gap. And your desire to fill these gaps and find the treasure is your resulting curiosity.

So how can we make any learning attempt more like a treasure hunt? Based on Loewenstein’s model, we can derive factors that influence our curiosity:

• The size of the “information gap”: We will be more curious if we miss one crucial piece, rather than a lot of pieces. The more holes there are in our treasure map in important locations, the less excited we will be to start the journey. On the other hand, if the gap is so small that it seems non-existent, we won’t be curious at all. If we can fill all the gaps in our treasure map before we leave home, there is no reason to explore. 

• Our confidence in being able to close the gap: The more we believe we can figure out what is missing, the more curiosity we will feel. If we believe we can never find the treasure, we will certainly never leave the warm pub!

So, how can the “treasure hunt” approach help us stay curious when we want to learn?

Two simple “treasure hunt” questions that can keep our curiosity burning

These questions help us overcome the two most common curiosity killers: Fear and boredom. Both of them are caused by a mismatch between the size of the information gap we face and the confidence we have. If the gap is a lot larger than we feel confident to handle, we feel fear. If the gap is much smaller than what we think we can handle, we will face boredom. Fortunately, both are obstacles we can overcome in our treasure hunt! Two simple questions can guide us to create the perfectly sized information gap for us.

Overcoming fear: What can we learn to support our quest?

Sometimes, our curiosity dies because we feel intimidated on our quest, and worry that we won’t ever find the treasure. We can become more confident adventurers by improving our existing knowledge and skills.

Very often, other people have filled some of our information gaps before. We can use what they learned to shrink our own information gap. Can we find reference material, such as books, articles, courses etc. that help us fill in some gaps? Can we ask someone who has already done parts of what we are trying to achieve? To fill some of the holes on our treasure map, we can for example consult a detailed world map or ask a trustworthy cartographer for help. 

There will often be holes in our treasure map that we cannot just fill with other people’s knowledge. If these holes still feel intimidating, we can gradually build up our knowledge and skills. Can we identify smaller experiments that take us into the right direction? Maybe instead of committing a 4 months expedition on our treasure hunt, we can do a 4 days scouting trip in the same direction? That way, we learn about some of the obstacles on the trip and can gather more information. And if we complete the shorter quest successfully, maybe a slightly larger one doesn’t seem as intimidating?

Overall, the more we know, the more we want to know! Curiosity feeds on itself in a very virtuous loop.

Overcoming boredom: What are the missing pieces of our map?

And sometimes, our curiosity dies because we get weary on our adventure and feel there is no more treasure to be found. Now is a good time to explore the holes of our treasure map:

• What do we not know yet?

• What doesn’t make sense yet?

• What directions are we possibly overlooking?

Let’s look for the inconsistencies and counterintuitive aspects. Every gap hides a potential treasure!

With these two guiding questions, we can shrink and grow the information gap to be just right for us. We can use them to care and feed our curiosity to guide us on our quest, all the way to the treasure we seek.

Curiosity is a choice

These guiding questions also helped me understand the difference between my two attempts at learning conflict resolution. In the communication workshop, no matter how engaged I was, I just couldn’t connect the lessons to anything in my personal experience. I was blind to the gaps in my knowledge, and therefore didn’t bother to even embark on the adventure of applying it.

Ten years later, I felt those gaps very painfully in my fights with my then-partner. And while I didn’t remember any of the techniques of the workshop, I at least remembered that conflict resolution is a learnable skill. So I sought out existing knowledge in the shape of a book, which helped me tremendously in increasing my confidence on this topic. My curiosity skyrocketed, and I haven't stopped learning about conflict resolution since!

The next time I find myself bored in a workshop, I’ll make sure to look for the hidden gaps in my understanding. And when I find myself overwhelmed by the amount of unknowns in a topic, I’ll look for a way to fill in as many of those unknowns and build up my adventuring skills. Because any topic can be fascinating if we use the “treasure hunt” questions to nurture our curiosity for it.

No opportunity for learning needs to be wasted. With the “treasure hunt” questions, we are at choice in how much we want to be curious about anything!