Interest and Humiliation: Reframing Economics Through Affect Psychology

AbstractEconomics has long been framed as a science of rational choice and incentives. This essayargues for a more fundamental starting point: affect, and specifically the primary motivator ofinterest-excitement. Following the work of psychologist Silvan Tomkins, we posit that interest is the engine of all human action—the force that directs attention, fuels curiosity, and makeslearning and creation possible . Its opposite is not irrationality, but interruption—a motivational collapse experienced as profound confusion. This framework reveals that economic expansion is a function of cultivated interest, while contraction and alienation are the results of its systemic interruption. We argue that the painful social experience of economic humiliation is the consequence of a system that generates chronic interruption at the core of motivation. By reframing economics as the science of human attention, we can move beyond abstract models and toward.a discipline capable of addressing the systemic humiliation and motivational collapse that plague modern economic life.