There are reasons to believe that the answers are yes. One reason, says Kahan, is that his measure of curiosity suggests that incremental change is possible. When he measures scientific curiosity, he doesn’t find a lump of stubbornly incurious people at one end of the spectrum and a lump of voraciously curious people at the other, with a yawning gap in the middle. Instead, curiosity follows a continuous bell curve: most people are either moderately incurious or moderately curious. This doesn’t prove that curiosity can be cultivated; perhaps that bell curve is cast in iron. Yet it does at least
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