Judging Beauty and Liking: The Effects of Personal Intuitions and Task Instructions

Abstract

<p>[eng] Some studies have found strong correlations between liking and beauty ratings, suggesting that liking and</p><p>beauty are merely two manifestations of the same underlying hedonic factor (Berlyne, 1974b). The results of</p><p>other studies suggest that liking and beauty judgments differ in how they engage perceptual and cognitive</p><p>processes associated with value assessment (Russell, 1994).We wished to determine whether such discrepancies</p><p>reflect the way participants conceive of beauty and liking. We hypothesized that beauty and liking</p><p>would be more alike if participants had to rely on their own, intuitive conception of these judgments than</p><p>if they received task instructions specifying how to think of them. Asked to rate 56 images (28 faces, 28</p><p>artworks) on a 5-Likert scale in terms of liking and beauty, half of the participants were instructed how</p><p>to conceive of liking and beauty, while the other half made judgments according to their own understanding</p><p>of beauty and liking. Results showed that beauty ratings for both types of images were higher with instructions</p><p>than without instructions, whereas liking ratings were lower with than without instructions. Also,</p><p>response times were significantly higher for beauty ratings with instructions than without instructions, irrespective</p><p>of stimulus type, but not for liking ratings. We interpret these findings as evidence that liking and</p><p>beauty evaluations differ in the degree to which they engage cognitive models: whereas beauty evaluations</p><p>appear to rely on a model of what counts as beauty, models of what counts as liking hamper liking</p><p>evaluations.</p>