“Curiouser and curiouser!” Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll.

People who espouse the Inquisitive attribute have an almost insatiable curiosity — always seeking new information and asking questions. They have an eagerness to learn, often without any obvious reason for doing so, that would fit well on a young child. Their inquisitive minds and adaptable behaviours result in them tending to know something about almost anything. TV and pub quizzes are likely to interest those who espouse this attribute.

An insatiable curiosity can lead to conversations with anybody and everybody, even people who hold very different views. Disagreement is no barrier. Inquisitive espousers feel that debate — even heated debate — only leads to better and richer understanding; enabling discovery of new things about new topics, possibly even subjects that they had not considered exploring before. Such openness to change never threatens their sense of independence, because they are not worried about what others think of them.

Some people are driven to learn something new and specific in order to learn a skill or to reduce uncertainty. While, in the skills sense, this may be true of Inquisitive espousers too, they are unlikely to be driven by a psychological need for certainty to appease anxiety. They thrive on uncertainty. Driven by the process of learning as much as the product of learning, Inquisitive espousers gather information from diverse sources. Immediately useful information is a bonus for them, but not absolutely essential. Exploration is key. Inquisitive about the environment and people around them, they are like the hunter-gatherers of the Information Age.

Inquisitiveness as a behaviour and as an emotion has long been propounded as a driving force behind not only human development but developments in science, language, and industry. You can see it as the urge that draws us out of our comfort zones and adds to the growing pot of experience. As well as adapting to and thriving in a world that is constantly changing, these characteristics of Inquisitive espousers suggest that they enjoy their internal view of the world also to be in a state of flux. Their ideas and beliefs evolve by thinking about things that, at that particular moment, probably cannot be proved one way or another.

Espousers of the Inquisitive attribute are not passive recipients of information and learning. New knowledge results in new questions, which may challenge everyday norms. Absolute facts are seen as a starting point not as an end — useful working assumptions that encourage the art of the possible, rather than the science of the probable.