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I did some reading just now on state vs trait curiosity and I'm having a hard time understanding the difference. Can you give me an example?

• checkyoursudo 5y ago
  This is my opinion. I do not think there is a strong consensus on what state and trait curiosity actually are, though I think the following is reasonable. Trait curiosity is generally thought of as people who exhibit a broad desire to learn, to be open to new experiences, and to be creative, for example. If you like reading books on a wide variety of topics, or studying a range of fields in school or personal life, then you might have a curious personality trait. In this case, it is generally thought that you will rate certain questions on the Big Five Index [BFI] or the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory ver. 2 [CEI-II] more highly than others. I do not research trait curiosity. I collect data on it, but it's not that useful to me, really. Instead, I do computational modelling of human behavior using performance on discrete tasks and ratings about those tasks, which is more like state curiosity. If you are solving puzzles, or answering math/logic problems, or recalling difficult memory tasks, or answering pub trivia questions, and rating your curiosity levels about the discrete tasks or even individual questions, then that is generally considered state curiosity. Trait curiosity is part of your personality, while state curiosity is episodic (though with indeterminate time periods). Does that help?