Curiosity is alive and well in workers, but our workplaces are smothering it.
This State of Curiosity report captures how workers and leaders are feeling about their own personal curiosity and reveals the curiosity barriers workplaces create. Based on a survey of 1,925 workers, SurveyMonkey discovered that the vast majority of employees describe themselves as curious, and six in ten identify as strongly so. But only three in ten say their workplace strongly rewards curiosity. This tells us that curiosity—a vital prerequisite to all innovation at work—is in the workforce, but the way we work today is suppressing it.
That gap costs more than it used to. AI has shifted what employers measure and the output a worker produces no longer signals who is doing the thinking. Anyone with a chatbot can hand in a polished deliverable. Evaluation is moving upstream, to the inputs: the questions a worker asks, the assumptions they push on, and what they noticed that the machine missed.
Curiosity capacity, the practiced ability to stay open, ask sharper questions, and keep learning alongside AI, is the input that does the most work.
Three forces are draining worker curiosity:
- The AI middleman: Leaders are running questions by machines instead of by their teams at nearly three times the rate of the workers below them. The conversations that used to build judgment across an organization are being replaced by prompts, and the cost is showing up later in preventable mistakes.
- The scroll reflex: Workers spend hours a day in social media feeds engineered to serve up the next thing and keep them scrolling, and the habit follows them to the desk. More than a third of workers now accept whatever AI produces without pushing back. They say asking a colleague is more reliable than AI, but they take what AI gives them anyway.
- The efficiency squeeze: Speed is what management rewards, and it's left no time in the workday to be curious. The result is a workforce that has learned to stop asking the questions that would push thinking and catch problems earlier.
These three forces don't just smother curiosity. They blur what workers think curiosity even is. Most call themselves curious, but four in ten admit to pretending they understood something rather than ask the question that would have exposed they didn't.
The youngest workers are paying the highest price. Gen Z workers report the most pressure to already know the answer, the highest rates of pretending to understand, and the steepest drop in asking questions of colleagues. The conditions for asking have gotten worse, and Gen Z is responding rationally to them.
The good news is the same as the bad: workplaces created this and can change it. Certain employers are already showing how to design curiosity back into the workday, and their playbook is one any leader can act on tomorrow.
This report is a guide to building curiosity capacity—and a measure of what it costs employers when they don't.
State of Curiosity: The full report
Download the report to see what's cultivating and crushing innovation, and how to build curiosity capacity.
