Most workers describe themselves as curious, but only 30% say their workplace actually rewards curiosity, according to SurveyMonkey’s State of Curiosity 2026 report, based on a survey of 1,925 US workers conducted in April. Sixty percent of respondents call themselves strongly curious, yet the surrounding culture, not personal disposition, is what determines whether that curiosity turns into a question asked out loud. The gap is starkest for Gen Z workers, who report the highest rates of pretending to understand something they do not, feeling pressure to already know the answer, and going quiet after asking “too many” questions.
Why it matters for HR: the report ties psychological safety directly to measurable behavior, not just sentiment. In workplaces the survey classifies as high-capacity, 94% of employees say they feel safe asking questions. In low-capacity workplaces, that number drops to 41%, and the same gap shows up in whether employees see meetings as open discussion at all, 38% versus just 15%. Half of workers say they have redone work because an initial question went unasked, a direct line from a culture problem to wasted output that HR can put a number on.
The original insight is what the report calls the “AI middleman” effect: leaders route questions to AI at nearly three times the rate of individual contributors, replacing conversations that used to build shared organizational judgment with private machine prompts. Duke Fuqua’s Jack Soll, quoted in the research, warns that “once you get an answer from AI, it feels complete,” which short-circuits the follow-up questions that used to surface disagreement early. HRTech has covered how toxic workplace cultures are now outgrowing empathetic ones financially, and this data adds a mechanism: a culture that quietly trains people to stop asking questions is also routing around the leadership pipeline curiosity used to build.
Source: SurveyMonkey
