Curiosity: Why We Would Rather Be Right Than Ask Questions

As a child, you wanted to know everything. Now you mostly tell people what you already know. How curiosity gets buried beneath experience, ego and shame, and why we need to become über-curious again.

In 1992, I wondered whether it was possible to create panoramic photographs that would allow people to walk digitally through a city. That does not sound particularly revolutionary today. We have Google Street View, three-dimensional maps and phones that take better pictures than cameras that cost a fortune back then. But in 1992, you still had to explain the internet to most people. Digital photography was roughly where AI was a few years ago. Everyone sensed that something was about to happen, but nobody knew exactly what.

I spoke to photographers, technicians and people following the latest developments in computers and digital photography. One of them was Peter Paul Huf, the son of renowned photographer Paul Huf and someone deeply involved in emerging photography and printing technologies.

They all told me it was impossible.

I did not accept that answer. Not because I knew more than they did, because I demonstrably knew less, but because I wanted to understand why it could not be done. Which part was impossible? Where did the technology fail? What knowledge was missing? Who could we find who might look at the problem differently?

I kept asking questions. Not once, but until it became annoying. Why? Why? Why?

Two years later, we created Discover Amsterdam, a digital city guide on CD-ROM that allowed users to move through Amsterdam one intersection at a time. Budapest and Vienna followed. We also produced Paris and Barcelona, although those editions were never released.

It did not become Google Street View. If it had, I would probably be writing this from my private island. But we did build something that every expert had told us was impossible.

Since then, I have stopped believing that ordinary curiosity is enough.

You need to be über-curious.

Impossible Is Often a Polite Way of Saying: I Do Not Know

Experts rarely say that they do not know the answer. They say something cannot be done, is unrealistic, is unwise or has already been tried. That sounds much better in a meeting and allows everyone to keep their status intact.

“I do not know” opens a conversation. “That is impossible” closes it.

But impossible surprisingly often means: with the knowledge, experience, technology and imagination I currently possess, I cannot see how it could be done. That is a completely different statement. It ends with a question mark, not a full stop.

Experience is valuable. Without it, we would have to make every mistake again, and we already have TikTok for that. But experience is also an archive of how the world worked yesterday. The faster the world changes, the more dangerous it becomes to confuse that archive with the limits of what will be possible tomorrow.

An expert often knows exactly what has failed so far. That is not the same as knowing what is impossible.

Children Ask. Adults Explain

Children can drive you completely mad with questions. Why is the sky blue? Why do I have to sleep? Why does that man have no hair? Why are you allowed to do that? Why is water wet? Why can we not eat pancakes every day?

They have not yet developed the social talent of pretending to understand everything.

Thank goodness.

In research analysing young children’s spontaneous questions, natural conversations at home were studied. The children asked more than one hundred questions per hour on average. About 71 percent were information-seeking questions. These were genuine attempts to discover something they did not yet know.

That is more than one question per minute. Try doing that during an executive meeting and see how long it takes before someone asks what point you are trying to make.

A child discovers a gap in their knowledge and immediately puts it on the table. They do not first consider their reputation, job title or personal brand. They do not wonder whether the question sounds intelligent enough. They simply want to know how the world works.

Children also learn early that not everyone knows the same things. During an observational study of preschool children engaged in free play, questions accounted for 25 percent of what children said to adults, compared with 17 percent of what they said to other children. Even preschoolers deliberately approach the person from whom they expect to learn something.

And then we grow up.

We collect knowledge, experience, beliefs and conclusions. This helps us make decisions more quickly, but it also causes us to investigate less. Instead of asking what someone means, we fill in the answer ourselves. Instead of examining why something does not work, we reach a conclusion. Instead of testing our assumptions, we search for arguments that confirm what we already believed.

Children want to know. Adults want to be right.

Real Curiosity Can Change Your Mind

Adults still speak sentences that end with question marks. A salesperson asks questions to make a sale. An interviewer asks questions because it is their job. Someone on a date may ask questions to appear interested, fill an uncomfortable silence or stop the other person from escaping to the bathroom after three minutes and never returning.

But a question mark is not automatically evidence of curiosity.

Real curiosity begins when the answer is allowed to change you. It is not merely about collecting information. It means being willing to reconsider your plan, your opinion or the version of the truth you have carefully constructed.

That is precisely where things become uncomfortable. We like to say that we are open to new insights, as long as those insights confirm what we already believe. Information that supports us is called evidence. Information that contradicts us is quickly dismissed as an opinion.

You can appear curious for years without ever allowing yourself to learn anything genuinely new.

Dunning-Kruger: Even the Missing Question Is Missing

The original research by Justin Kruger and David Dunning began with the story of a bank robber who had rubbed lemon juice on his face. He believed it would make him invisible to security cameras. Lemon juice could be used as invisible ink, so his reasoning felt perfectly logical to him.

Then the police showed him the footage.

In the experiments that followed, participants completed tests on logic, grammar and humour. The lowest-performing group scored around the 12th percentile but estimated their performance to be around the 62nd. They were not slightly mistaken. They had played an entirely different competition in their heads and declared themselves the winners.

That is the core of the Dunning-Kruger effect. You need a certain amount of knowledge about a subject to recognise where your knowledge falls short. When you know very little, you may not only be unable to see the answer. Sometimes, you cannot even see that a question is missing.

You see this everywhere. The entrepreneur who watches three Instagram videos and suddenly understands marketing. The politician who reduces a complex social problem to a single cause. The manager who asks no questions because their position supposedly requires them to have the answers. The partner who thinks they already know what the other person means and therefore stops listening.

They do not lack answers.

They lack questions.

Ego: We Would Rather Look Smart Than Become Smarter

Dunning-Kruger explains why we fail to recognise some gaps in our knowledge. Ego and shame explain why we recognise other gaps but choose to hide them.

There are two reasons why an adult may remain silent:

• I do not ask because I think I already know.

• I do not ask because I do not want you to see that I do not know.

From the outside, these two people look identical. Both remain silent and may therefore appear remarkably confident. But confidence is not evidence of knowledge. Sometimes it is merely the absence of enough insight to doubt yourself.

Across 247 observed academic seminars, the mean and median number of questions was only six. Six questions from a room containing an average of 34 highly educated people who had specifically come to listen to an expert.

Even more revealingly, 91 percent of the women and 92 percent of the men surveyed said that they sometimes had a question but did not ask it. They worried that they had misunderstood something, would not sound intelligent enough or would be judged by the speaker and their colleagues.

The curiosity was there. Ego was simply standing in front of the microphone.

A child says, “I do not understand.”

A director says, “Let us revisit this strategically at a later stage.”

The New Generation Carries Every Answer in Its Pocket

My former stepson is seventeen and wants to import clothing from Asia and sell it here at a profit. It is a good plan. Real entrepreneurial energy.

The only problem is that he wants to do everything entirely his own way. Asking questions of someone who has built several companies, or listening when I try to share something with him, is not particularly high on his list. He probably thinks I am an old man who still remembers what a CD-ROM is. To be fair, he has a point.

Still, I see this more often among the new generation. They have access to more information than any generation before them, and they sometimes confuse access to knowledge with actually possessing it. Everything can be searched. TikTok explains it in 38 seconds, a YouTuber provides the step-by-step plan and AI writes a complete business plan within a minute. Why listen to someone who has already experienced it?

Because finding information is not the same as understanding what matters.

AI can tell you to consider import duties, VAT, quality control, returns, inventory, cash flow and profit margins. But AI cannot see from a supplier’s face that you are probably being deceived. A YouTuber cannot feel what happens when all your money is trapped in five hundred items of clothing that nobody wants. TikTok will not call when you have calculated your VAT incorrectly.

Perhaps I sound like an old man complaining about social media. I am willing to take that risk. Old men are not always right, but some of them have already filed a VAT return incorrectly.

Experience does not guarantee that someone is right. Refusing to listen, however, almost guarantees that you will reinvent mistakes that others have already made.

A seventeen-year-old naturally wants to sit behind the wheel. That is part of growing up. But autonomy without curiosity is not independence. It is experimenting while blindfolded and then feeling proud that you managed to hit the wall all by yourself.

Listening Costs Nothing, Except Perhaps Your Certainty

One of the stupidest misunderstandings in communication is the belief that listening is the same as agreeing.

It is not.

Asking a question does not mean that you are giving the other person the advantage. Listening to advice does not oblige you to follow it. You collect information, compare it with what you already know and then make your own decision. You may still decide to do exactly what you had planned. Fine. At least it is now a decision rather than a reflex.

Asking questions is not surrendering to someone else’s knowledge. It is expanding your own.

Yet many adults experience a question as a small defeat. Asking means admitting that you do not know something. Listening creates the risk that the other person might say something intelligent. Changing your opinion after receiving new information can result in people accusing you of being inconsistent.

That is why we often do not listen to learn. We wait for the other person to breathe so that we can start talking again.

My former stepson does not have to follow my advice. He is free to make his own decisions and his own mistakes. But refusing to listen is not independence. It is voluntarily rejecting knowledge that is already available.

In Business, Being Right Can Be Damn Expensive

Inside companies, you constantly hear: “We already tried that.” This does not only reject an idea. It assumes that the market, technology, circumstances and people are still exactly the same as they were the last time.

Experience is used to close a new question before anyone has examined what has changed. That is comfortable, efficient and sometimes disastrous.

In politics, changing your opinion after receiving new information is treated as weakness. Yet that is exactly what an intelligent person should do. In reality, a politician who learns something is accused of changing direction. Remaining loudly and consistently wrong is therefore often the safer option.

In relationships, we stop asking what the other person means because we believe we already know. We invent their intention, respond to our own interpretation and call the resulting argument a communication problem. Meanwhile, the other person may have said something entirely different from the statement we have now been angry about for twenty minutes.

Leadership also suffers from a lack of questions. A job title creates the expectation that you should provide answers. Leaders therefore start talking when they should be investigating and make decisions before they understand what is actually happening.

Good leaders are not the people with the most answers. Good leaders ask the questions that other people do not see, do not want to hear or do not dare to ask.

Über-Curiosity: Keep Asking Until Impossible Breaks

The world changes faster than our certainty. Technology, markets, relationships and society do not wait for our experience to become relevant again. Anyone who clings exclusively to what they already know does not become consistent. They slowly become irrelevant.

That is why ordinary curiosity is not enough.

Being über-curious means continuing to ask questions when an expert says something is impossible. It means listening without automatically obeying. It means actively searching for the gap in your own reasoning and allowing in the information you would rather not hear.

It also means that you do not limit yourself to questions whose answers you will enjoy. You ask the questions that could destroy your plan, business, belief, relationship or carefully constructed self-image:

• Which assumption beneath my plan could be wrong?

• Who demonstrably knows more about this than I do?

• What information am I trying to exclude?

• What could genuinely change my mind?

• Am I not asking because I know the answer, or because I am afraid of it?

That is not weakness. It is intellectual maintenance.

Discover Amsterdam did not exist because I knew more than the experts. It existed because I refused to confuse the limits of their knowledge with the limits of what was possible. I kept asking why it could not be done until we discovered how it could.

The most dangerous sentence in a rapidly changing world is not, “I do not know.”

The most dangerous sentence is: “I already know enough.”

Frequently Asked Questions About Curiosity and Asking Questions

Why do children ask so many questions?

Children ask questions to fill gaps in their knowledge immediately. In research into natural conversations between young children and adults, children asked more than one hundred questions per hour on average. About 71 percent were information-seeking questions. Asking questions is not a sign of ignorance for children. It is one of their most important tools for understanding the world.

Is it true that a four-year-old asks almost 400 questions per day?

The frequently repeated figure of 390 questions per day comes from a 2013 survey of 1,000 British mothers. According to that survey, four-year-old girls asked an exceptionally high number of questions. It was commercial research conducted for online retailer Littlewoods, not a peer-reviewed scientific study. Scientific research confirms that young children can ask more than one hundred questions per conversational hour, but not that every four-year-old asks exactly 390 questions each day.

Do adults ask fewer questions than children?

Adults generally ask far fewer open, information-seeking questions than young children. They possess more knowledge and experience, but this also makes them more likely to believe that they already understand a subject. Adults also consider whether a question is useful, intelligent or socially safe. Children put their ignorance on the table. Adults package or conceal it.

Why do adults ask fewer questions as they get older?

Adults ask fewer questions because experience gradually turns into certainty. We start assuming what someone means, relying on previous conclusions and searching for information that confirms what we already believe. Ego, status and shame also hold us back. We would rather look knowledgeable than visibly become more knowledgeable.

What does the Dunning-Kruger effect have to do with asking questions?

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes how limited knowledge can prevent someone from recognising the limits of their knowledge. You may not only be unable to see the answer. Sometimes, you cannot even see that a question is missing. Without a recognisable knowledge gap, there is no reason to ask. You think you understand the subject, while actually knowing too little to recognise what you are missing.

Does not asking questions automatically mean that someone is not curious?

No. Someone may have a question but remain silent because they fear appearing unintelligent, uncertain or incompetent. In research involving 247 academic seminars, more than 90 percent of the surveyed academics said that they sometimes had a question but did not ask it. Curiosity can therefore exist while ego, status or social uncertainty prevents it from becoming visible.

Why would adults rather be right than learn something new?

Being right feels safe. A new answer may reveal that an earlier decision was wrong, a belief is inaccurate or someone else knows more. People therefore sometimes defend their existing story instead of asking a new question. We call information that supports us evidence and dismiss information that contradicts us as an opinion.

Is listening the same as agreeing?

No. Listening means gathering information before reaching a conclusion. You can listen to someone seriously and still decide that they are wrong. Refusing to listen does not protect your independence. It voluntarily restricts the knowledge available to you.

Why is curiosity important for entrepreneurs and leaders?

Markets, technology and human behaviour change faster than accumulated experience. Entrepreneurs and leaders who rely only on what worked in the past can miss important changes. Good leaders do not need to possess every answer. They need to ask the questions that other people do not see, do not want to hear or do not dare to ask.

How can adults become more curious?

Start by examining your own certainty instead of merely collecting more information. Ask yourself:

• Which assumption beneath my plan could be wrong?

• Who demonstrably knows more about this than I do?

• What information am I trying to exclude?

• What could genuinely change my mind?

• Am I not asking because I know the answer, or because I am afraid of it?

A good question does not merely confirm what you already know. A good question can change your thinking, decision or behaviour.

What is über-curiosity?

Über-curiosity means refusing to treat the first answer as the end of the conversation. It means continuing to ask questions when someone says something is impossible, actively searching for weaknesses in your own reasoning and listening without automatically obeying. Ordinary curiosity wants to know something. Über-curiosity wants to know even when the answer is uncomfortable.

Can curiosity be relearned?

Yes. Curiosity rarely disappears completely, but it can become buried beneath routine, certainty, status and the fear of appearing ignorant. By admitting more often that you do not know something, asking better follow-up questions and allowing information that challenges your beliefs, curiosity can become a habit again. The most important step is to stop confusing “I already know” with “I have genuinely investigated it.”