Interesse, Wissen und Können:

"I recall once inteviewing a young man who tested out as borderline retarded, in the range of IQ 75, to get some idea of his fund of general information. I decided to begin by trying to find out how much he knew about whatever topic he claimed to have the greatest interest in and to know the most about. It was baseball. He frequently went to baseball games with his father or watched them on television, and found them very exciting. Yet when I questioned him about baseball, I discovered that he didn’t know for sure how many players are on a team, couldn’t name all the positions on the team, and had only vague and at times incorrect notions of the rules of the game. He knew the names of three or four players on the local team but didn’t know any of the world’s most famous players or even the names of any of the Big League teams. When I probed other topics in which he claimed an interest—automobiles and gardening—I found that he possessed even less information about these than about baseball. It was evident that his quite low score on the General Information subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, on which I had tested him, gave an accurate assessment of his level of general knowledge of the world around him. On the other hand, just out of curiosity, I later put the same baseball questions to a learned professor who, I happened to know, had no interest in any sport whatever. He even had a positive disdain for spectator sports and claimed never to have seen a baseball game in his life. Yet he had no trouble answering the several baseball questions I asked him, and could name three Big League teams and several famous baseball players. Interestingly, he was quite surprised to discover that he knew anything at all about baseball and seemed puzzled as to where he could have learned facts about something he cared nothing about. But conversations with him revealed that he knew a great deal about a great many things, in science, literature, the arts, economics, politics, and world affairs. In his own field he is an acknowledged world authority."

Arthur R. Jensen - Straight Talk About Mental Tests (1981)

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Interesse, allein und für sich genommen, garantiert weder Wissen noch Können. Im Sinne der Investment Theorie entscheiden Interessen darüber mit, in welche Themen und in welches Können der Mensch seine Gedanken investiert. Wie rasch und wirksam eine Person aber generell neue Fähigkeiten und neues Wissen erwerben kann, wird nicht primär von dieser Interessiertheit, sondern von der allgemeinen Effektivität des Denkens bestimmt.