Background
With the media’s large presence in our lives —whether that be in the form of music, advertisements, fashion trends, politics, and social media—it is incredibly important to understand not only how people judge what they are consuming, but also understand how people can be influenced to judge differently. A study conducted in 2020 sought out to find answers to this question by investigating how external influences can impact our judgments specifically with different types of aesthetic stimuli.
What underlying factors may affect the amount of influence external information has on our aesthetic preferences? Previous research suggests that our perception of some object categories may be more prone to influence than others. For instance, research shows that people agree on their judgements for biological categories (ex: human faces) more than artificial categories, or man-made objects (ex: an abstract painting). Therefore, it may be more difficult to influence biological categories than artificial ones. Similarly, objects for which we already have strong opinions may be much harder to change than those we feel neutral about.
This study aimed to test these questions by exploring the effect of external information on two categories, images of faces (biological stimuli) and abstract painting images (artifactual stimuli). The researchers’ hypothesized that judgments for abstract paintings would be influenced to change as a result of external information more than face images. They additionally hypothesized that external information would have less influence on more extreme aesthetic ratings.
Study Details
The study had participants from a wide age range, nineteen different countries, in hopes to get a good representation of cultural differences in influence. Participants were asked to give their demographic information and sexual orientation to investigate if certain orientations had biases. They were also asked to give their years of training in fine arts or history since those with that background were removed to avoid any resistance to influence.
All biological stimuli consisted of faces and all artifactual stimuli consisted of abstract paintings, where no shape had any resemblance of any biological structure. Images for both categories were chosen from databases that already had beauty ratings collected, which was beneficial so the study’s stimuli could be composed of an equal distribution of low-, medium-, and high-level beauty ratings.
This was a ‘within-subject’ design, therefore, all participants were exposed to images of both faces and abstract images. For each presented image, they were asked to make a beauty rating and how certain they were of that rating. They were immediately presented with a rating that they were told was the average of other participants and asked to re-rate the image following this external information, as seen in the below image, Figure 1.
Here’s where the key manipulation of the study is found. This “average rating” the subjects were exposed to as the external influence was really a fake rating that was altered based on their initial rating, where low ratings resulted in an equal or higher given average rating and vice versa. The purpose of this was to see how much the researchers could influence the participants based on ratings that matched or were different from their original ratings.
In total, subjects rated 80 of each category of images.
Results
The results showed that people are influenced by external information. The mean beauty ratings were significantly influenced by external information. As seen in graph Figure 2, there is more rating change (RC) when the average fake ratings differed from the participant’s original rating, as opposed to when there was a match. Consequently, here was no change in the match condition. This was expected, but a bit surprising to our lab given some subjects may adopt an anti-conformist strategy if they are too much like the crowd.
On to the main question, the results showed that indeed faces were less influenced by external information than abstract art! This effect was modulated by a few factors. For example, it was found that the greater the certainty the more resistant one is to changing their rating after external influence. Surprisingly, more extreme beauty ratings were not influenced differently than less extreme ones.
Discussion
By finding that external information can significantly influence aesthetic judgements, these results provide interesting insight into how media’s outside influence can intentionally interfere with consumer’s aesthetic perceptions. With this finding being largely applicable to better understand the power media, brands, and advertisements can have on consumers’ decision-making, it begins to call into question the ethics of the amount of control companies can have over consumers’ choices and lifestyle.
With faces being less influenced by external information than abstract art, this shows the strength of people’s opinions on biologically-based information that contrasts to the flexibility of people’s opinions for that of abstract concepts. This result, however, is not too surprising considering that this suggests innate understandings of biological information are much more developed in the brain for things found naturally in nature like faces, flowers, and nature scenes. With the background of previous research showing there is more agreement on biological stimuli, it makes sense to see these results. It suggests humans have a built-in standard for what is beautiful based on innate and previous experiences with biologically-based situations, which in this study resulted in increased confidence–almost as if humans were already innately aware of other’s opinions even before they are presented with them!
On the other hand, people have less shared experiences surrounding abstract concepts since those types of stimuli may lack a basis of symmetry or biological-relation to be able to compare a specific scenario to. With the variety and lack of uniformity present in the abstract images presented in this study, people being more prone to changing their beauty ratings reflects their inability to have relativity with how they defined that stimuli beautiful by lacking an assortment of experiences to compare them to. With this in mind, it would be interesting to test if there would be as great of a difference in influence between the beauty ratings of faces and abstract art if the “artifactual” category contained images of artificially-made objects that were present in everyday life (ex: a shirt, furniture, architecture, etc.). Would people’s increased shared experiences with these types of artificial objects lead to less influence by others opinions? Would these types of artificial stimuli provide a uniform agreement of beauty as strong as that for faces?
Additionally, if products like clothes were looked at in the frame of functioning as innate survival objects to compliment biological needs, would this suggest a constant agreement on the perception of clothes as a result of how clothes relate to survival? However, if there were a norm for the basis of beauty in clothes, then what does this research have to say about continuous clothing trends? Based on the more stable opinions of the faces compared to the abstract images, this research suggests that trends are a result of using clothes–a technical by-product of biological needs–and utilizing the abstract element of design as a means to manipulate consumer’s opinions to feel the continuous cyclical need to replenish their clothes according to the trends. Do you really need those bell-bottomed jeans when you have a pair at home that biologically meets the same goal to protect your legs from the cold as your other jeans? This problem reflects the continuous need to “keep up with the Joneses” as a consequence of the hold consumerism has on the vulnerability of humans’ perception of beauty. In this sense, continuously evolving trends are analogous to that of the fluctuating beauty ratings of abstract art. For both the trends and abstract art, the perception of beauty is truly not in the eye of the beholder, but instead lies in the eyes of another.
References
Bignardi, G., Ishizu, T., & Zeki, S. (2021). The differential power of extraneous influences to modify aesthetic judgments of biological and artifactual stimuli. PsyCh Journal, 10(2), 190-199.
