Teaching Curiosity: An Essential Advertising Skill?

AbstractSeveral advertising industry professionals believe curiosity is an essential skill for the advertising business. In this paper, we describe how an advanced undergraduate class provides experiences that allow students to tap into multiple dimensions of curiosity. We question students at both the start and the end of the class to better understand if class exercises based on various curiosity models have changed how students view curiosity.IntroductionIn one sense living itself is learning. As long as we're alive and awake we're almost certain to be learning something, perhaps at a very slow pace and very inefficiently. The important thing is what we are learning: at what rate; when, where, and how much of it we are going to absorb. (Nichols, 1963, p. 23)As advertising instructors, we are tasked with helping our students develop specific skills that they can use in an advertising career, whether these skills be research, copywriting, design, management, media planning, selling or the like. What is lacking from these classes that focus on these skill sets is a class that provides a single overarching skill: the skill of curiosity. While every human is theoretically bom curious, for various reasons we often lose the ability to be curious as we grow. We argue that curiosity is a skill that every advertising person needs to have, and we provide a description of a class developed at the University of Oregon to help students strengthen their own sense of curiosity. We also report on students' perceptions of their curiosity both before and after taking the class to identify whether the class affects their perceptions of their curiosity.Literature ReviewWhat is Curiosity?Curiosity as a construct has been studied by numerous researchers in a variety of contexts. Curiosity has been defined as a desire to know, an interest leading to inquiry, an inquisitive interest in others' concerns, or nosiness. In academic literature, curiosity has been described in numerous ways: a drive, a personality characteristic or a motivation to explore.Nissen (1930) characterized curiosity as both an inborn exploratory drive and a secondary, or learned, drive, acquired through classical conditioning (this is the idea of trait curiosity). James (1890), though, saw curiosify solely as a personality characteristic. This view suggests that there are two types of curiosity: a type of susceptibility to being excited in general (the idea of sensation seekmg) or a type of scientific curiosity directed toward specific information (the idea of state curiosity). This multidimensional view suggests that curiosify is a type of behavior that may become inhibited as people age yet may be able to be stimulated in them.Loewenstein (1994) built on one definition of curiosity - the desire to know - by explaining that curiosity arises in certain situations, for example, when someone becomes aware of a specific information gap in a specific knowledge domain. One's desire to know can also arise if an individual encounters stimuli that are either novel or inconsistent with an idea that he or she holds; these types of stimuli create some type of cognitive dissonance within the individual (Berlyne, 1960). When an individual experiences these types of gaps, he or she may feel some type of deprivation that can only be alleviated by closing the gap through finding the right information. Finding this informa- tion can be as simple as using a search engine to quickly find an answer or as complex as developing hypotheses to test and collecting the data to test them, thus either confirming or disconfirming the hypothesis. Arguably, this latter method leads to a deeper understanding of the issue.Olson and Camp (1984) believe there are two types of curiosity: general curiosity (a mix of trait and state curiosity) and experience seeking (the idea of sensation seeking). Both types can lead to a deep level of learning by providing cues that motivate people to increase their own knowledge. …