Consensus and contention in beauty judgment.
iScience
; 27(7): 110213, 2024 Jul 19.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-39006484
ABSTRACT
Variance across participants is at the heart of the centuries-old debate about the universality of beauty. Beauty's belonging to the eye of the beholder implies large interindividual variance, while beauty as a universal object property implies the opposite. To characterize the variance at the center of this debate, we selected two quartets with either high- or low-variance images with high typicality and a given mean beauty. The quartets have high or low variance across 50 participants (group variance) and correspondingly high or low variance across images of a quartet for each participant (quartet variance). We asked 52 new participants to estimate their own mean and quartet variance. Participants successfully predicted their quartet mean but failed to predict their quartet variance. Though invisible, beauty variance is essential to prediction, both in theory and in practice. The quartets show that mean beauty is not the whole story - beauty variance is heterogeneous.
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Language:
En
Journal:
IScience
Year:
2024
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Estados Unidos
Country of publication:
Estados Unidos