Is curiosity a professional responsibility?

A project has failed after months of work and someone says that it was obvious all along that it wouldn’t work. Are they arrogant or do they really believe what they are saying? Also, if they knew all along then why didn’t they speak up  before? 

How accurately can we judge what we thought we knew before the outcome was known?

Fischhoff (2003) suggested that knowledge of how an event turned out increases people’s estimate of how likely that outcome had been. The participants in their study struggled to recognise how the information had influenced their judgment and this included assessments of what others could have known beforehand. So what this means is that once we know what has happened, we’re more likely to think that it was going to happen from the start.

So hindsight bias could affect professionals evaluating previous decisions or explaining outcomes. Of course, they may genuinely have expected the failure yet they weren’t able to speak up. Either way, we still try to understand what could have happened. 

Sensemaking is an ongoing process of trying to understand a situation so that people can continue with their actions. Some interpretations seem reasonable even when there isn’t a complete answer. So just because an explanation makes sense doesn’t automatically mean it’s accurate (Weick et al., 2005). 

What if the professional was certain about the project failure before it happened? Would they still consider other possibilities? 

Here it’s possible that they were either right from the start, that they reached a conclusion too early or maybe both. Al Essa et al. (2026) found that medical students who received misleading information at the beginning were more likely to reach a wrong answer and spent less time going through the information than those who didn’t receive it. It suggests that what we learn first can shape how we think by influencing how we consider the information that we receive later. 

So getting incorrect information at the start may make us settle too early on an explanation and perhaps make us less curious about other explanations. But what happens when we recognise that something is missing? Schweitzer et al. (2023) show that gaps in workplace information can cause both curiosity and frustration with different relationships to work engagement. 

Does this mean that when there are gaps we should resort to unlimited questioning? Absolutely not. There’s a distinction between recognising a meaningful information gap and trying to remove every single uncertainty. Often professionals need to make a call without all the details and there are practical reasons for it. 

Is curiosity a professional responsibility then or not? Being curious is not the same as being responsible for the explanations that we give. But when our explanations influence decisions, we have a reason to question how certain we are. Yes, there’s a need for curiosity to question why we feel confident about our explanations and to recognise when important context or details are missing. It also helps us change our prior understanding when new evidence is found, yet this doesn’t mean that we should keep searching for answers forever. Hence, I feel like curiosity is a professional responsibility but with limits. 

Would you consider someone more credible when they always seem certain or when they can explain what they know and what they’re still unsure about? 

References

Al Essa, A., Schmidt, H. G., Mamede, S., Knežević, K., Zwaan, L., & Magzoub, M. (2026). Premature closure underlies bias in medical diagnosis in students: A randomised controlled experiment. Medical Education, 60(10), 1102–1109. https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.70229

Fischhoff, B. (2003). Hindsight ≠ foresight: the effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. In Qual Saf Health Care (Vol. 12, pp. 304–312). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1743746/pdf/v012p00304.pdf

Schweitzer, V. M., Gerpott, F. H., Rivkin, W., & Stollberger, J. (2023). (Don’t) mind the gap? Information gaps compound curiosity yet also feed frustration at work. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 178, 104276. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2023.104276

Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the process of sensemaking. Organization Science, 16(4), 409–421. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0133