Beauty, the feeling

Abstract

Many philosophers and psychologists have made claims about what is felt in an experience of beauty. Here, we test how well these claims match the feelings that people report while looking at an image, or listening to music, or recalling a personal experience of beauty. We conducted ten experiments (total n = 851) spanning three nations (US, UK, and India). Across nations and modalities, top-rated beauty experiences are strongly characterized by six dimensions: intense pleasure, an impression of universality, the wish to continue the experience, exceeding expectation, perceived harmony in variety, and meaningfulness. Other frequently proposed beauty characteristics - like surprise, desire to understand, and mind wandering - are uncorrelated with feeling beauty. A typical remembered beautiful experience was active and social like a family holiday - hardly ever mentioning beauty - and only rarely mentioned art, unlike the academic emphasis, in aesthetics, on solitary viewing of art. Our survey aligns well with Kant and the psychological theories that emphasize pleasure, and reject theories that emphasize information seeking.

Fig. 1.

Average ratings for beauty experiences for all experiments. A) In USA, polar plot of average ratings on 12 philosophy-derived dimensions (12D) across all top-rated (green) vs. less-than-top-rated (red) immediate-beauty trials (i.e. they consider their immediate experience). B) In USA, average 12D ratings for top-rated immediate-beauty trials, separately for each stimulus type. C) Average 12D ratings on top-rated remembered-beauty trials (i.e. they consider their own remembered experience), separately for each independent population sample: India, UK, and two in USA. For reference, the dashed green lines represent the averages for the top-beauty-rated trials, copied from panel A. D) In USA, average ratings for all remembered-beauty (dark green) vs. remembered-relief (blue) trials. Not pictured: ratings on the two dimensions perfection and peacefulness that were not included in all studies; both peacefulness and perfection ratings were higher for beauty compared to relief ratings. E) In USA, polar plot of average ratings on 11 psychology-derived dimensions (11D) across all top-rated (green) vs. less-than-top-rated (red) immediate-beauty trials. F) Average 11D ratings on top-rated immediate and remembered (bottom-most) trials. Shaded areas in all polar plots indicate ±SEM (not visible due to small SEM in some panels).

Fig. 2.

Histograms of ratings in response to the seven questions on participants’ general beliefs about beauty posed at the end of each experiment. Each solid bar indicates the proportion per experiment, differentiated by shades of gray. Immediate beauty USA (2) and remembered beauty USA (3) refers to the people who rated psychology-based questions. Open bars indicate the overall distribution of ratings across all experiments.