Two routes to aesthetic preference, one route to aesthetic inference

Abstract

Aesthetic preferences vary strongly between people. Yet, it can be essential to infer what other people aesthetically prefer. Therefore, we investigated lay people’s ability to infer aesthetic preferences and the involved processes. Because aesthetic preference depends on affective as well as cognitive processes, we asked 40 participants to rate 24 artworks on the dimensions Positive Attraction, Cognitive Stimulation, and Emotionality. Additionally, participants had to infer other people’s judgments concerning the same stimuli and dimensions. In the self-assessment, Positive Attraction correlated strongly with Emotionality as well as with Cognitive Stimulation, whereas in the other-assessment, Positive Attraction correlated only with Emotionality. An interassessment correlation revealed that about half of the participants produced a significant medium to high correlation between their other assessments and the mean others′ self-assessment, depending on the respective dimension. Thus, our results indicate that many individuals are able to infer aesthetic preferences, and that preferences for artworks are inferred primarily via affective stimulus appraisal.