What Is Interest Good For?

Paul J. Silvia:

"What is interest good for? Izard and Ackerman (2000) suggest a motivational function—“interest motivates exploration and learning, and guarantees the person's engagement in the environment. Survival and adaptation require such engagement” (p. 257). Diverse areas of research demonstrate beneficial motivational effects of interest. Studies of successful adolescents indicate that “undivided interest” promotes the growth of expertise (Rathunde, 1996, 1998, 2001). An experience-sampling study of high school students assessed subjective experience during school-related activities (Rathunde & Csikszentmihalyi, 1993). Three years later, achievement and talent were measured. Feelings of undivided interest during the first year of high school strongly predicted academic success, engagement with school, and teachers' ratings of achievement three years later. Reading research ... shows that people process texts more deeply and remember the material more accurately when the texts are interesting (Hidi, 2000; Schiefele, 1999). Furthermore, students are more successful in courses that they find personally interesting (Schiefele, Krapp, & Winteler, 1992). Finally, the experience of interest during an activity predicts the duration of engagement, volunteering to repeat the activity, and the development of skill (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Fisher & Noble, 2004; Prenzel, 1992; Reeve, Cole, & Olson, 1986). The motivational function of interest extends to activities that are not inherently interesting or appealing. Interest can bolster motivation to complete tasks that are boring and tedious. Much of what people have to do, such as washing dishes or compiling references, is boring. To boost their motivation to complete such tasks, people implement interest enhancing strategies (Sansone & Harackiewicz, 1996; Sansone & Smith, 2000a, 2000b; Sansone, Wiebe, & Morgan, 1999; Sansone, Weir, Harpster, & Morgan, 1992). For example, when people have to copy letters from a template, they make the task more interesting by competing against time or against their past performance levels, varying the artfulness of the lettering, or cognitively restructuring the task in ways that foster interest. The use of interest enhancing strategies predicts feelings of interest, which in turn increase persistence at the task (Sansone & Smith, 2000b). Some researchers suggest a second function—interest is adaptive because it motivates people to develop diverse experiences that can be helpful when unforeseen events occur (Fredrickson, 1998). Berlyne (1971a), for example, writes: “Since every scrap of retained information might help one day and thus adds its quota of security against future perplexity, frustration, and helplessness, it is easy to see that moments of freedom from more urgent claims (including those of sleep and rest) can hardly be better occupied than with activities that add to the nervous system's holdings in this commodity” .

The broaden-and-build model of positive emotions (Fredrickson, 1998, 2001) proposes that interest, like other positive emotions, lacks short-term functions associated with survival. Instead, interest serves long-term developmental goals: curiosity about the new and the possible broadens experiences and attracts people to new possibilities. The broaden-and-build model suggests that interest cultivates diverse experience by orienting people to new and unusual events and facilitates the growth of competence by motivating sustained activity in a specific area. The notion that diverse experience is an adaptive function of interest has an intuitive appeal. Indirect evidence comes from research on sensory deprivation. People typically find sensory deprivation intensely boring and unpleasant (Schultz, 1965). When confined to extended sensory restriction, people often experience hallucinations, show deficits in cognitive and perceptual performance, and exhibit disturbances of normal motivation (Fiske, 1961; Scott, Bexton, Heron, Doane, 1959; Zubeck, Pushkar, Sansom, & Gowing, 1961). Other indirect support comes from longitudinal research on stimulation seeking, a trait relevant to interest (see chapter 4). Stimulation seeking at age 3 strongly predicted intelligence at age 11, suggesting a possible role of diverse experience in cognitive development (Raine, Reynolds, Venables, & Mednick, 2002). Of the two functions of interest that have been proposed—interest as a motivational resource and interest as a facilitator of diverse experience—only the first function is well supported by research. Many studies, including experiments that manipulate interest, show how interest improves motivation and learning (see Hidi, 2000; Sansone & Smith, 2000b; Schiefele, 1999). The second function seems intuitively plausible, but it has not yet received the empirical attention that it deserves. The indirect evidence is intriguing, however, and future research should explore it further."