Your brain can't judge and wonder at the same time
Try this: think of someone whose behavior recently frustrated you. Notice the evaluation that forms — the label, the verdict, the quiet certainty that you know what's going on with them. Now ask yourself a genuine question about the same situation: "What might be true about their experience that I haven't considered?"
Feel that? The judgment didn't get argued down or suppressed. It got displaced. The moment genuine curiosity entered, the judgment lost its grip — not because you decided to be generous, but because your brain shifted into a different cognitive mode entirely.
This isn't a metaphor. It's a measurable phenomenon with decades of research behind it. Curiosity and judgment compete for the same neural real estate, and curiosity almost always wins — when you let it.
The architecture of curiosity: five dimensions, not one
Most people think of curiosity as a single trait — you either have it or you don't. Todd Kashdan's research at George Mason University demolished that assumption. In a series of studies involving thousands of adults, Kashdan identified five distinct dimensions of curiosity, each operating through different mechanisms (Kashdan et al., 2018).
Joyous Exploration is the prototype — the desire to seek out new knowledge and the genuine pleasure of learning something unexpected. Deprivation Sensitivity is the discomfort of not knowing, the restless need to close knowledge gaps. Stress Tolerance is the willingness to sit with the confusion and anxiety that come from exploring unfamiliar territory. Social Curiosity is the drive to understand what other people think, feel, and do. And Thrill Seeking is the appetite for novel experiences that carry uncertainty.
What matters for judgment replacement is this: Kashdan's research found that higher curiosity consistently correlates with lower defensiveness. When you activate curiosity — particularly joyous exploration and social curiosity — you suppress the threat-detection circuitry that generates evaluative judgments. You can't be genuinely fascinated by why someone did something while simultaneously concluding they're wrong for doing it. The two states are neurologically competitive.
Kashdan's work also identified four subgroups among curious people: the Fascinated (high across all dimensions, 28% of the population), Problem Solvers (driven by deprivation sensitivity, 28%), Empathizers (strong social curiosity, 25%), and Avoiders (curious but anxiety-limited, 19%). You don't need to be fascinated by everything. You just need enough active curiosity in the right dimension to displace judgment in a given moment.
Broadening versus narrowing: what emotions do to your thinking
Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory (2001) provides the mechanism for why curiosity and judgment can't coexist. Fredrickson demonstrated that positive emotions — including interest, which is the emotional component of curiosity — broaden your momentary thought-action repertoire. When you feel interested or curious, your attentional scope widens, you consider more options, you notice more details, and you generate more creative responses.
Negative emotions do the opposite. Fear narrows attention to the threat. Anger narrows attention to the target. And judgment — which is evaluative by nature — narrows attention to the verdict. When you judge something, you're effectively closing a cognitive file: this is good, this is bad, this person is competent, this approach is wrong. The evaluation terminates exploration.
Fredrickson's research showed that joy sparks the urge to play, and interest sparks the urge to explore. Both of these urges are inherently expansive — they open new territory rather than collapsing onto a conclusion. The practical implication is profound: you don't need to argue yourself out of a judgment. You need to activate a broadening emotion (curiosity, interest, wonder) and the narrowing emotion (the judgment) loses its hold naturally.
This explains something most people have experienced but never named: the moment you become genuinely interested in why someone holds a different opinion, the frustration evaporates. Not because you agreed with them, but because your cognitive mode shifted from evaluating to exploring.
The clinical evidence: curiosity as the engine of change
The most rigorous evidence for curiosity replacing judgment comes from motivational interviewing (MI), developed by William Miller and Stephen Rollnick. MI was born from a direct observation: the traditional approach in substance use counseling — confronting patients harshly to "break through their denial" — didn't work. It produced resistance, defensiveness, and dropout.
Miller and Rollnick discovered that when clinicians approached patients with genuine curiosity about their perspective — "Help me understand what drinking does for you" rather than "You need to stop drinking" — patients opened up, explored their own ambivalence, and changed their own behavior. The mechanism wasn't persuasion. It was the absence of judgment creating cognitive space for self-examination.
The "spirit of MI" explicitly replaces confrontation with curiosity, education with evocation, authority with autonomy, and explanation with exploration. Clinicians trained in MI learn to suppress their own evaluative reflex ("this patient is in denial") and replace it with genuine wonder ("what makes this behavior make sense from their perspective?"). The results have been replicated across hundreds of studies: patients who feel genuinely explored rather than judged are significantly more likely to change (Miller & Rollnick, 2013).
This isn't just clinical technique. It's a demonstration of a universal principle: people — including yourself — cannot examine their own patterns while being judged for having them. Remove the judgment, and examination happens naturally. And the fastest way to remove judgment is not to suppress it but to become genuinely curious about what's underneath it.
Growth mindset: curiosity as the operating system
Carol Dweck's growth mindset research provides the cognitive framing. In a fixed mindset, experiences get sorted into evaluations: this went well (I'm smart), this went badly (I'm not smart enough). The judgment is automatic and identity-level. In a growth mindset, the same experiences get sorted into questions: what can I learn from this? What would I do differently? What don't I understand yet?
Dweck's research at Stanford showed that the internal monologue of a growth mindset "is not one of judgment but one of voracious appetite for learning, constantly seeking out the kind of input that you can metabolize into learning and constructive action." People with fixed mindsets made stronger forecasts about what others would do based on single behaviors — they judged quickly and firmly. People with growth mindsets reserved judgment and stayed curious longer (Dweck, 2006).
The connection to this lesson is direct: a judgment is a fixed-mindset operation. It takes an observation and collapses it into a verdict. A question is a growth-mindset operation. It takes the same observation and opens it into an exploration. "This code is poorly written" is a fixed evaluation. "What constraints or context led to this code looking the way it does?" is a growth-oriented question. Same observation. Completely different cognitive trajectory.
The shift isn't about being generous or charitable. It's about being accurate. Judgments based on incomplete information — which is almost all judgments — are systematically wrong. Curiosity generates more information, which makes your eventual assessment more accurate. Being curious isn't being soft. It's being rigorous.
Curiosity in practice: from code reviews to difficult conversations
The engineering world provides the clearest laboratory for this principle. Consider the difference between two code review responses:
Judgment: "Why would you do it this way? This doesn't follow our patterns."
Curiosity: "I notice this takes a different approach from our usual patterns. What was your reasoning?"
The first response activates threat detection in the author. They become defensive, explain less, and either comply resentfully or push back combatively. The second response activates their own analytical thinking. They explain the constraint, the tradeoff, or the reasoning — and in doing so, they often discover their own gaps. Google's research on team effectiveness found that psychological safety — the confidence that you can ask questions and share concerns without being judged — was the single most important factor in high-performing teams. Curiosity is the behavioral expression of psychological safety: when leaders and peers consistently ask questions rather than issue verdicts, everyone's thinking improves.
This pattern scales beyond engineering. In any difficult conversation — with a partner, a colleague, a direct report — the person who arrives curious instead of judgmental changes the entire dynamic. Not because curiosity is "nicer" (it isn't always), but because it generates information that judgment forecloses. The manager who asks "What happened?" before concluding what happened gets a more accurate picture. The partner who asks "What were you feeling when you said that?" before deciding what was meant gets closer to the truth.
AI as a curiosity amplifier
Large language models turn out to be powerful tools for generating the questions that curiosity requires. When you catch yourself in a judgment, you can use AI to break the evaluative frame:
- "I just concluded that [judgment]. Give me five alternative explanations for the same observation."
- "I'm frustrated by [situation]. What questions would a genuinely curious person ask about this?"
- "Here's a decision someone made that I disagree with: [decision]. What constraints or values might make this decision logical?"
This works because AI doesn't share your emotional stake in the judgment. It can generate the questions your curiosity would produce if the judgment weren't blocking it. The resulting perspectives aren't always right, but they reliably break the evaluative tunnel vision that judgment creates.
You can also use AI to practice curiosity as a skill. Describe a scenario where you judged quickly. Ask the model to role-play the other perspective. Ask it to generate the questions a skilled motivational interviewer would ask in that moment. The goal isn't to outsource curiosity — it's to see the shape of what curiosity would look like in situations where judgment currently dominates, so you can recognize and replicate that shape on your own.
Protocol: the judgment-to-question conversion
When you notice a judgment forming:
- Name it. Say the judgment explicitly, even if only to yourself: "I think this is a bad idea" or "I think this person doesn't know what they're doing."
- Pause at the period. A judgment ends in a period. It's a statement, a conclusion, a closed file. Notice that closure.
- Convert the period to a question mark. Transform the judgment into a genuine question: "What makes this idea make sense to the person proposing it?" or "What do I not know about this person's experience or constraints?"
- Follow the question. Actually pursue the answer. Ask the person. Investigate the context. Generate alternatives. The question only displaces the judgment if you treat it as a real inquiry, not a rhetorical device.
- Notice what opens. Genuine curiosity produces a physiological signature: softened posture, widened attention, reduced urgency to conclude. If you feel that opening, you've made the shift. If you don't, the judgment is still running underneath.
This isn't about abandoning evaluation. After genuine curiosity has produced more information, you may arrive at a stronger, more nuanced assessment than the original snap judgment. The goal isn't to never judge. It's to never judge prematurely — and curiosity is the mechanism that buys you the time and data to judge well.
In the next lesson, you'll learn to apply this principle in low-stakes situations first — practice with small stakes first — because the curiosity-over-judgment shift is easiest to build where the emotional charge is lowest.
Sources
- Kashdan, T. B., Stiksma, M. C., Disabato, D. J., et al. (2018). The Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale: Capturing the bandwidth of curiosity and identifying four unique subgroups of curious people. Journal of Research in Personality, 73, 130-149.
- Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218-226.
- Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2013). Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.
- Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
- Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.
- Kashdan, T. B., & Silvia, P. J. (2009). Curiosity and interest: The benefits of thriving on novelty and challenge. In S. J. Lopez & C. R. Snyder (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology (2nd ed., pp. 367-374). Oxford University Press.
- Fredrickson, B. L. (2004). The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 359(1449), 1367-1377.