Artistic motivations are intrinsic, specific, and temporally stable by nature: Evidence from large real-life Brazilian public data between 1987–2004

Artistic behavior as aesthetically enhancing activities is conceptualized as a functionally autonomous activity within the evolved human behavioral repertoire. Accordingly, it should be intrinsically motivated, and it might also be expected to be temporally stable and domain specific. Preferential freely-pursued activities reflect intrinsic motivation and offer a valuable measure of artistic motivation. We used a large decades-long real-life public Brazilian data set from university applications to test these ideas. We analysed data on extra-class activities from 674.699 late-adolescents applying for university courses between 1987 and 2004, mostly between 17 and 19 years of age; approximately half men and half women. We found that 27% of individuals reported that Artistic/cultural activities were the leisure-time activity they participated in most frequently, and 32% reported they spent the longest period of free-time doing Artistic-activities (theater/cinema, music, dance, art-craft/plastic arts). Interestingly, from this whole sample, only less than 3% actually applied for artistic careers, which suggests that the prevalence of prioritizing artistic activities is higher than commonly assumed and includes not only professional artists, but also many hobbyists, amateurs and dedicated fans. Further, artistic careers applicants prioritize art almost three times more than the total of applicants, suggesting its specificity. After controlling for inconsistency of answer options during the period, prioritizing both Artistic/cultural and Artistic-activities remained temporally stable, as predicted. Despite limitations, overall results supported the hypotheses that artistic behavior is more intrinsically motivated, domain specific, and temporally stable. This plausibly demonstrates that artistic propensity has at least partly an evolved nature.