Curiosity is considered a natural behavior.
Originating from the Latin curiositas , curiosity is the intention to discover something that one does not know . This will usually focuses on things that do not concern the person or that, supposedly, should not matter to them.
For example: “I know it's not my business, but I'm asking you out of curiosity,” “Curiosity led me to open the trunk,” “There are things that are better not to know, I suggest you control your curiosity.”
Curiosity, a natural behavior
It is usually considered that curiosity constitutes a natural behavior , shared by humans and animals . In the case of people, various psychological and emotional factors come into play that lead an individual to search for information to satisfy their interest in certain data or to confirm a belief. Thanks to curiosity, people interact with other subjects and with the environment in general.
Curiosity can be associated with an instinct that is even part of the subsistence mechanisms of living beings. Curiosity, in this sense, is encoded in the DNA of the species.
"Curiosity killed the cat" is a popular expression.
Dangers and damage
In some cases, curiosity can lead to dangerous or harmful behavior . A man cannot violate the intimacy and privacy of another just to satisfy his curiosity: this means that he does not have the right to open his correspondence, spy through the window or go through his garbage with the justification of wanting to know more about him.
Another example of unhealthy curiosity is the person who decides to jump from thirty meters high because they want to discover what it feels like.
Curiosity as a driver of development
But curiosity is usually one of the starting points towards personal, artistic and professional development . During childhood, before submerging ourselves into that dangerous series of prohibitions and rules devised by people we will never meet, it is normal that we do not know how to stop ourselves from the impulse to know more, to learn, to get to the bottom of each mystery. that we stumble upon, or that we do not want to do it even though our elders try to dissuade us.
And so, letting ourselves be carried away by our desire to discover what is apparently hidden and forbidden, we often cultivate vocations, or we open doors that other human beings believed impossible to open, or that they completely ignored. In trivial cases, curiosity is associated with searching for the hiding place of Christmas gifts , reading someone else's letter or spying on another person through a peephole ; but this impulse can lead us to generate great advances.
Social impositions
Of course, the curiosity that, as mentioned in the third paragraph, we share with the rest of the animals is as interesting as the mechanism that we acquire and implement with increasing intensity to block it. How does a person who showed constant restlessness in his childhood become moderate and resistant to change?
Through the advice of elders and the disappointments of life, little by little we become convinced that the risks are not worth it, and thus we turn off our curiosity. Once again, the power of social impositions shapes us, sacrificing some of our best traits in the process.
The cat and curiosity
It is interesting to mention that the popular metaphor "curiosity killed the cat" originates in the English language and serves to warn about how dangerous it can be to investigate or experiment excessively. There is also an ending to this phrase, although it is not used as frequently: "but satisfaction revived him."
It is worth mentioning that its original version did not contain the term "curiosity", but rather "concern", and its first appearance in literature can be seen in the work " Every Man in His Humour ", by the British playwright Ben Jonson, in 1598. .