When Comfort Replaces Curiosity

There will come a point where a survey can only take you so far. This is especially true when it contains moderation or mediation models. These problems are serious yet are routinely ignored and remain widespread. It's one of those classic cases where the statistical machinery is more powerful than the data it is being applied to. The models answer questions that a single survey will never be equipped to ask. None of this means surveys are useless, but it does mean we should be much more honest about what they can and cannot tell us.

What makes this more interesting is that researchers often seem more content to try to drag more out of a survey or psychometric instrument, rather than switch up their methods. 

I remain struck by how rarely researchers move beyond their comfort zone, either methodologically or by stepping away from their home discipline. When this happens, it is rarely done with any real conviction. Largely because it involves questioning many methodological and philosophical assumptions. It means accepting that the current direction of travel, which may have taken many years, has ultimately not been successful.

I should be clear: this isn't a criticism of any individual's competence. It's an observation about curiosity, or rather, the absence of it. If anything, there's something admirable about the researcher who acknowledges the boundaries of what they know and stays within them. That's far preferable to the alternative I see rather too often: the researcher who ventures into another discipline but refuses to actually listen to it, treating every unfamiliar method or framework as something to be argued against rather than learned from. It leads to confused papers that never get published. It is a somewhat annoying but insurmountable reality that one has to speak with a level of totality in order to please a specific disciplinary norm. The exception to that is general science journals, which are highly selective!

Learning to speak another discipline's language is genuinely difficult. It requires humility, patience, and critical collaboration. You cannot do it alone. It demands a team effort, and frankly, it demands a willingness to be guided, even hand-held, by people who know things you don't. Regardless of career stage, you must revert to being a student once more.

That last part is where many of us struggle. Academics are not, as a rule, especially comfortable admitting what they don't know. Which is somewhat of a contradiction, as our entire job is to learn! However, the incentive structures of academia tend to reward confidence and specialism, not vulnerability and breadth.

I think there's a useful analogy with fitness. If the exercise isn't hard, you're not getting fitter. If the work you're doing isn't genuinely challenging — if it doesn't make you feel slightly out of your depth — then you're probably not progressing. You're maintaining. And maintenance has its place, but it's not where new insight comes from. 

If you feel safe in the area you're working in, you're not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting. — David Bowie

This isn't to say that all papers need to be gruelling endeavours. Some are easier to write than others, and that's fine. But if everything you produce sits comfortably within the same methodological tradition, using the same tools, asking the same kinds of questions, it might be worth asking whether comfort has quietly replaced curiosity.

Remaining curious isn't about abandoning what you know. It's about being willing to find out what you don't.