Expressivist to the core: Metaaesthetic subjectivism is stable and robust

New Ideas in Psychology 57 (2020) 100760

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Expressivist to the core: Metaaesthetic subjectivism is stable and robust☆ Nathaniel Rabb a, *, Alex Han b, Lucy Nebeker c, Ellen Winner d a

Tufts University, United States CUNY Graduate Center, United States c University of Pennsylvania, United States d Boston College, United States b

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Aesthetic judgments Objectivism Expressivism Metaaesthetic beliefs

Two common observations about aesthetics are in tension: that people generally consider aesthetic judgments subjective, and that people generally behave like objectivists (arguing over judgments, making choices based on judgments of trusted critics, rejecting strong assertions of aesthetic equivalence). This tension would be resolved if the first observation turned out to be false—if people endorsed subjectivism weakly, flexibly, or rarely. We tested whether people can be pushed to endorse objectivism under certain circumstances. Across a large sample (N ¼ 588), aesthetic subjectivism proved consistent and robust to experimental manipulations. Even judgments that reflected participants’ own evaluations of artworks were considered just as subjective as judgments directly opposed to their personal evaluations. We conclude that the apparent tension can be explained by the philo­ sophical position of expressivism and discuss expressivism’s prospects as a framework for understanding aesthetic judgment.

1. Introduction

why do they sometimes argue with those who arrive at different judg­ ments? Trying to convince someone that one’s own judgment is better than theirs would seem to reflect an implicit belief that the judgment has objective truth value. Moreover, people consider some aesthetic judges more reliable than others—hence preferences for one art or music critic over another—and sometimes treat aesthetic equivalences like basic errors. Pity the poor soul who suggests that Dan Brown is as good a writer as William Shakespeare, for “we pronounce, without scruple, the sentiment of these pretended critics to be absurd and ridiculous” (Hume, 1757/1993, p. 137). Yet these aesthetic disputes seem unintelligible if the relevant judgments are considered mere subjective preferences. There is no apparent utility in convincing someone having an enjoyable experience eating a sandwich that she is not in fact having an enjoyable experience. If one’s declaration that Shakespeare is better than Brown just means that her Shakespeare experiences have been more enjoyable than her Brown experiences, why should anyone bother to disagree? In what follows, we first review the literature on beliefs about the epistemic status of different judgment domains including aesthetics and taste. We then report three experiments that attempt to knock loose people’s subjectivist beliefs about aesthetic judgments through increasingly strong manipulations. We conclude by considering the

When we look at a work of art we cannot help but evaluate it: Is it beautiful? Is it good? Is it moving? It is boring? When we pose such questions to ourselves, we are engaging in the work of aesthetic criti­ cism. When we answer these questions to our satisfaction, do we believe our answers are simply matters of personal opinion, or do we believe they have some objective truth value? The thought that aesthetic judgments are just matters of opinion and hence entirely subjective coincides with the folk sayings de gustibus non � chacun son gout, and different strokes for different folks. est disputandum, a These aphorisms ring true because aesthetic disagreement is common­ place, and the means for settling such disagreements are not obvious. Art experts often support evaluative claims by appealing to physical prop­ erties—the thin brushstrokes make the drawing elegant—but few would claim these properties cause elegance in any artwork. Hence, the step from physical description to evaluation seems unprincipled (Goldman, 1995). The more caveats required—thin brushstrokes in this but not some other context—the more ad hoc these appeals to physical prop­ erties appear. But if people believe that aesthetic judgments are entirely subjective,

This research was carried out in the Arts and Mind Lab, at Boston College. * Corresponding author. Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA, 02155, United States. E-mail address: [email protected] (N. Rabb).

☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2019.100760 Received 8 September 2019; Received in revised form 26 October 2019; Accepted 28 October 2019 Available online 14 November 2019 0732-118X/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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these items predominated. Beebe and colleagues’ (2015; Beebe & Sackris, 2016) items were similarly heterogeneous and included judg­ ments about food. Cova and Pain (2012) grouped their items more precisely and analyzed paradigmatic subjective judgments (e.g., “brussel sprouts are good”) separately from beauty judgments of artworks, people, and natural objects. The observed pattern was comparable to those already discussed, but again, objectivism was measured with a forced choice question, precluding finer distinctions. Moreover, the dispute scenarios involved attributions of properties to single objects (“X is F”) rather than comparisons of two objects (“X is F-er than Y”). This may have intro­ duced experimental demand, since aesthetic descriptors are often treated as relative adjectives, i.e., terms used to indicate comparative degrees of property exemplification rather than the presence or absence of a property (Liao & Meskin, 2017). Just as it may seem pointless to argue over whether a piece of string is long—long compared to what?— so participant responses that neither disputant was correct may have been influenced by pragmatic demands in the experimental materials. Methodological concerns aside, the picture emerging from the literature supports the intuition that people are aesthetic subjectivists, and a recent, large-scale study (Cova et al., 2019) conducted across 19 countries reported similar results (although again with some interesting regional variations, as in Beebe et al., [2015]). How do we square this picture with the observations that people argue about aesthetic judg­ ments, favor some aesthetic critics over others, and reject extreme aesthetic equivalences? One possibility is that people harbor objectivist notions that only emerge when the aesthetic stakes are higher than they were in the tasks so far described. It is already known that the perceived objectivity of ethical judgments can be enhanced by circumstantial factors such as the salience of religion (Yilmaz & Bahçekapili, 2015) or the humanizing presentation of a purported disputant’s image (Beebe, 2014). We therefore tested whether the perceived objectivity of aesthetic judgments could also be increased via experimental manipu­ lations—first, by providing reasons to believe that the artworks being judged differ in quality; second, by using artworks that really do differ in quality according to independent raters; and finally, by using artworks that really do differ in quality according to the respondents themselves.

philosophical position of expressivism as a means to resolve the tension between explicit beliefs in aesthetic subjectivism and behaviors that seemingly reflect objectivism. 2. Prior research on objectivity To our knowledge, Solomon, Pruitt, and Insko (1984) conducted the first study on epistemic beliefs about taste judgments. Respondents rated the degree to which judgments about color swatches were caused by the objects themselves versus the judgment-maker’s internal states. Judg­ ment types were subjective (Linda found swatch A more attractive than swatch B), objective (Linda thought A contained more blue), or “qua­ si-objective” (experts preferred A for an interior design), and the degree of peer consensus (high/low) regarding these judgments was manipu­ lated. As expected, people thought objective judgments were caused by the object more than the person and showed the opposite pattern for subjective judgments. But they also attributed high consensus judgments to the object more than the person and low consensus judgments to the person more than the object. Interestingly, quasi-objective judgments elicited intermediate ratings in the high consensus condition, suggesting that people sometimes see subjectivity and objectivity as regions on a continuum rather than discrete categories. More recent experiments have measured rather than manipulated the epistemic status accorded to different judgment domains. Goodwin and Darley (2008) asked participants to rate their agreement with judgments concerning matters of fact (e.g., “Mars is the smallest planet in the solar system”), morality (“Robbing a bank in order to pay for an expensive holiday is a morally bad action”), social convention (“Wear­ ing pajamas and a bath robe to a seminar meeting is wrong behavior”), and taste (“Shakespeare was a better writer than is Dan Brown”). Re­ spondents later saw a subset of the judgments with which they had strongly agreed or disagreed and were asked: given a dispute over this claim, must one party be mistaken (the objectivist response), or could both be right (the subjectivist response)? Results showed a clear hier­ archy of domains: factual judgments received the highest proportions of objectivity responses, followed by moral, conventional, and taste judg­ ments. Goodwin and Darley (2012) replicated this pattern and found that perceived consensus increased objectivity responses, echoing Sol­ omon, Pruitt, and Insko’s (1984) results. Beebe, Qiaoan, Wysocki, and Endara (2015; Beebe & Sackris, 2016) used similar stimuli and measures to examine epistemic beliefs across cultures (China, Poland, Ecuador) and age groups (U.S. 12- to 89-year-­ olds). Some variations were observed: Ecuadorians considered moral and factual judgments equally objective; moral objectivism plummeted during Americans’ twenties but spiked in their thirties. Still, the location of taste judgments at the bottom of the hierarchy was consistent throughout. These studies all used forced choice measures, which could be problematic if people see objectivity as a continuous rather than dichotomous dimension. Furthermore, they used a mixed bag of judg­ ments to represent the domain of taste. For instance, Goodwin and Darley’s (2008) taste items included the following: (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

3. Overview of experiments In three experiments, we examined people’s beliefs about the ob­ jectivity of aesthetic judgments compared to beliefs about judgments of taste, morals, and facts. Adult U.S. residents (Mage ¼ 34.7, SD ¼ 11.8; 46.6% female) were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Participants were excluded for failing an attention check, taking the experiment twice, admitting to using external websites during the experiment, or giving insufficiently extreme liking ratings (Experi­ ment 3 only). Participants saw eight statements of the form X is F-er than Y and rated the degree to which each statement concerned matters of opinion or matters of fact, with the meaning of this distinction explained as follows: This is a study about the different kinds of statements that people make. Some statements reflect matters of fact, meaning the truth of the statements could be verified independently of what the speaker thinks, while other statements reflect the speaker’s tastes, opinions or preferences. We are going to present you with a series of state­ ments where two objects are compared. Your task is to say whether the statements you see express facts or preferences or maybe some­ thing in between. For each statement you’ll see a 1–7 scale. A rating of 1 means that the statement is entirely a matter of taste and there are no independently verifiable facts behind it; a rating of 7 means that the statement is entirely a matter of fact and tastes and prefer­ ences play no role. Be sure that you are not evaluating how much you

CNN provides better news coverage than does Fox News. Bill Clinton is a better public speaker than George W. Bush. Schindler’s List is a better film than Police Academy. Da Vinci was a better painter than was Monet. Classical music is better than rock music.

While the last three judgments concern art, their scope varies widely, from individual works to artists’ oeuvres and on to entire genres. Even staunch objectivists might not defend (e) since the objects being compared are nearly unbounded sets. Moreover, (a) and (b) do not concern artworks or aesthetic criteria in even a loose sense. Because respondents rated just one taste judgment (determined by their level of agreement in the first experimental task), it is unknown which if any of 2

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agree with the statement, but are judging the nature of the statement itself.

non-normative order. 4. Experiment 1

The objects being compared in the taste and aesthetic domains were specific foods, colors, and artworks rather than indeterminate sets (genres, oeuvres). The 7-point rating scale provided a more sensitive measure of objectivity than an either/or question. To minimize lin­ guistic differences among domains, the comparative dimension was “better” in all cases except, necessarily, factual judgments. Because judgments of highly similar objects are considered espe­ cially subjective (Heiphetz & Young, 2017), the statements compared objects that were dissimilar along key dimensions despite being mem­ bers of an obvious comparison class. Thus, factual judgments compared (for instance) the largest and smallest planet in the solar system (as shown in Fig. 1), taste judgments compared the colors liked most and least in previous color preference studies (Palmer & Schloss, 2010), and moral judgments compared embezzlement committed for commendable and disreputable reasons. See Table 1 for Taste, Moral, and Fact items used in all three experiments. For aesthetic statements, the dimensions varied across experiments. In Experiment 1, aesthetic statements compared artworks that differed in quality as implied by the text (see Table 2); in Experiment 2, the compared artworks differed in quality and visual characteristics according to an independent group of raters; and in Experiment 3, the compared artworks differed in quality according to the respondents themselves. We used fictional artist and artwork names to control for con­ founding effects of background knowledge. Judgments like “Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is better than Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Mem­ ories,” for instance, could be considered more objective than judgments comparing less familiar artworks due to participants’ sense that this statement reflects the consensus view, which would reveal nothing informative about aesthetics per se. Previous research has shown that participants grant higher objec­ tivity ratings to judgments with which they agree compared to those with which they disagree (Goodwin & Darley, 2012; Solomon et al., 1984), showing that the distinction between facts and opinions is a subtle one (Mitchell, Gottfried, Barthel, & Sumida, 2018). To account for this kind of effect, in all three experiments we presented the to-be-rated statements in either normative or non-normative order; we refer to this factor henceforth as comparison order. In the normative order, the statement was either factually correct (e.g., Jupiter is larger than Mer­ cury) or likely to be agreed with (e.g., butter pecan pie is better than ice cream with ketchup; stealing to pay medical bills is better than stealing to pay for a vacation; a centuries old, widely acclaimed painting is better than a new, relatively unknown one). In the non-normative order, the statements were reversed (Mercury is larger than Jupiter, etc.) and therefore likely to be disagreed with. This factor allowed us to test separately for effects of (a) agreement with the statements, (b) judgment domain, and (c) their interaction, if any. This in turn allowed us to examine whether participants were generally following instructions: if they simply rated their agreement with (rather than the objectivity of) the statements or failed to see any distinction between facts and pref­ erences, then statements in normative comparison orders should all have high ratings and statements in non-normative orders should have low ratings. Experiment 1 did not include images. Experiment 2 had image and no image conditions. Aesthetic items displayed paintings that were rated most and least beautiful, most and least geometric, and most and least complex in a prior study (Sanders, Davis, & Love, 2013). The to-be-rated statements asserted that the most beautiful, geometric and complex paintings are better than the least in the normative comparison order and vice versa in the non-normative order. Experiment 3 used images for all items, but aesthetic items displayed paintings that participants themselves had judged in a prior task. To-be-rated statements asserted that paintings participants liked most are better than those they liked least in the normative comparison order and vice versa in the

4.1. Participants Participants in Experiment 1 consisted of 212 U.S. adult Amazon Mechanical Turk recruits. 4.2. Method Participants rated the objectivity of two comparative statements in each of four domains (aesthetic, moral, taste, fact) for a total of eight items (see Tables 1 and 2). Half of the participants were given com­ parisons in the normative order; half were given comparisons in the nonnormative order. Participants received one of three kinds of aesthetic statements: those comparing a widely acclaimed to a relatively unknown painting (a consensus manipulation; test of time held constant); those comparing a centuries old to a recent painting (a test of time manipu­ lation; consensus held constant); and those comparing a centuries old and widely acclaimed to a new and relatively unknown painting (test of time þ consensus manipulated). This between-participants manipula­ tion of kinds of aesthetic comparisons allowed us to determine whether there was an order of comparison effect for any one of these three kinds of statements. The experiment concluded with a short measure of art knowledge adapted from Chatterjee, Widick, Sternschein, Smith, and Bromberger (2010) and basic demographic questions (age, gender, level of education). These variables showed no informative patterns in this or any subsequent experiments, so we do not discuss them further. 4.3. Results Two analyses of variance (ANOVA) were performed. A 4 (judgment domain) x 2 (comparison order) ANOVA revealed a main effect of domain, F(3, 630) ¼ 554.44, p < .001, η2p ¼ 0.725; see Fig. 2. Factual judgments were rated most objective (M ¼ 6.18), followed by moral (M ¼ 2.57), aesthetic (M ¼ 1.94), and taste (M ¼ 1.59) judgments. All pairwise comparisons between judgment domains were significant, ps < .001.1 As predicted, a comparison order effect, F(1, 210) ¼ 28.6, p < .001, ηp2 ¼ 0.12, showed that normative orders (M ¼ 3.35) were rated more objective than non-normative orders (M ¼ 2.79). But an interaction of comparison order by domain, F(3, 630) ¼ 9.19, p < .001, ηp2 ¼ 0.042, also occurred. Ratings of aesthetic judgments showed no comparison order effect, t(210) ¼ 0.44, p ¼ .664, Cohen’s d ¼ 0.06, while norma­ tive orders were rated more objective for judgments of fact, t (210) ¼ 5.43, p < .001, d ¼ 0.75, morality, t(210) ¼ 4.03, p < .001, d ¼ 0.55, and taste, t(210) ¼ 2.13, p ¼ .034, d ¼ 0.29. Next, a 2 (comparison order) x 3 (type of aesthetic statement) ANOVA was performed just for the aesthetic domain to examine com­ parison orders under the three factor levels (time, consensus, both), 1 We report raw p values for planned comparisons. All comparisons reported as significant survive Bonferroni corrections (domain tests: p ¼ .05/6; com­ parison order tests: p ¼ .05/4) except for normative versus non-normative items in the taste domain in Experiments 1 (padjusted ¼ .136) and 3 (padjusted ¼ .096) and the taste domain versus the aesthetic domain in Experiment 3 (pad­ justed ¼ .104). Tests of normative versus non-normative orders for aesthetic items, by contrast, did not approach significance either with or without Bon­ ferroni correction (ps ¼ 1, ps � .31, respectively). The pattern is also evident when ignoring the results of null hypothesis statistical tests and focusing instead on effect sizes. In all three experiments, the effects of comparison order are near zero for aesthetic statements (0 < d < 0.1) but range from small to large by Cohen’s rule of thumb for facts, morals, and taste, with judgment domain ef­ fects also in this range except for the taste domain versus aesthetic domain test in Experiment 3, d ¼ 0.17.

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Fig. 1. Example display showing a fact item (normative comparison order). Photos courtesy of NASA. Table 1 Taste, aesthetic, moral, and fact items from Experiments 1, 2, and 3.

Table 2 Consensus, test of time, and consensus þ test of time implied quality manipu­ lations for the two aesthetic items in Experiment 1.

Taste

Consensus

a. Consider two foods: butter pecan pie and ice cream with ketchup. Normative order: Butter pecan pie is a better food than ice cream with ketchup. Non-normative order: Ice cream with ketchup is a better food than butter pecan pie. b. Consider two paint colors: sky blue and dark yellow. Normative order: Sky blue is a better color than dark yellow. Non-normative order: Dark yellow is a better color than sky blue. Aesthetic a. Consider two paintings: Carramonde’s Twelve Windows and DeMantis’ City Wall. [Comparison order manipulations differed by experiment] b. Consider two paintings: Shettleworth’s Study #3 and Armoire’s Untitled. b. [Comparison order manipulations differed by experiment] Moral a. Consider two bank robbers, one who stole money to pay for his child’s lifesaving brain surgery, and another who stole money to buy expensive recreational drugs. Normative order: Robbing a bank to pay for a lifesaving operation is a better action than robbing a bank to pay for drugs. Non-normative order: Robbing a bank to pay for drugs is a better action than robbing a bank to pay for a lifesaving operation. b. Consider two embezzlers, one who stole money to pay for her mother’s hospital bills, and another who stole money to fund a vacation to Hawaii. Normative order: Embezzling money to pay family medical bills is a better action than embezzling money to pay for a vacation. Non-normative order: Embezzling money to pay for a vacation is a better action than embezzling money to pay family medical bills. Fact a. Consider two planets in our solar system: Jupiter and Mercury. Normative order: Jupiter is larger than Mercury. Non-normative order: Mercury is larger than Jupiter. b. Consider two U.S. cities: Anchorage, Alaska and San Diego, California. Normative order: Anchorage is farther north than San Diego. Non-normative order: San Diego is farther north than Anchorage.

a. Consider two paintings: Carramonde’s widely acclaimed Twelve Windows (1793) and DeMantis’ relatively unknown City Wall (1787). b. Consider two paintings: Shettleworth’s consistently praised Study #3 (from 1672) and Armoire’s little known Untitled (1665). Test of Time a. Consider two paintings: Carramonde’s widely acclaimed Twelve Windows (1793) and DeMantis’ equally lauded City Wall (1991). b. Consider two paintings: Shettleworth’s consistently praised Study #3 (from 1672) and Armoire’s equally beloved Untitled (2004). Consensus þ Test of Time a. Consider two paintings: Carramonde’s widely acclaimed Twelve Windows (1793) and DeMantis’ relatively unknown City Wall (1991). b.Consider two paintings: Shettleworth’s little known Study #3 (from 2004) and Armoire’s consistently praised Untitled (1672). Normative order for a: Carramonde’s Twelve Windows is a better painting than DeMantis’ City Wall. Non-normative order for a: DeMantis’ City Wall is a better painting than Carramonde’s Twelve Windows. Normative order for b: Shettleworth’s Study #3 is a better painting than Armoire’s Untitled. Non-normative order for b: Armoire’s Untitled is a better painting than Shettleworth’s Study #3.

objectivity rating for the opposite statement was 1.95, t(74) ¼ 0.71, p ¼ .481, d ¼ 0.16. 4.4. Discussion Judgments domains were hierarchically ordered by objectivity, with aesthetic and taste judgments situated squarely at the bottom. We note that the objectivity ratings for the moral statements may seem low given the comparatively high proportions seen in binary fact/preference tasks. We suggest that this is due to the fact that our two moral statements were about stealing, while other research has asked about protecting a murderer, assisted suicide, or abortion. Judgments about the latter is­ sues may be judged as considered more objective because these are considered more serious issues as they involve life and death.

since an effect might have been hidden when ratings were collapsed in the main analysis. This analysis revealed no interaction of comparison order by type of quality manipulation, F(2, 206) ¼ 1.68, p ¼ .189, ηp2 ¼ 0.016, and no main effects (Fs < 1, ps > .61). Indeed, the test-oftime/consensus manipulation had no detectable effect on aesthetic judgments even for the most extreme case: The mean objectivity rating for statements claiming that a very old, widely acclaimed artwork is better than a recent, little known artwork was 2.16, while the mean 4

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Fig. 2. Objectivity ratings by judgment domain and comparison order across three experiments. Asterisks above brackets refer to judgment domain tests (e.g., taste versus aesthetic). Asterisks above bars refer to comparison order tests (e.g., taste normative versus taste non-normative). ***p < .001, **p < .01, *p < .05. Error bars show SEM.

Using a more sensitive measure than in previous studies (one based on a rating scale rather than an either/or judgment of fact versus opinion), we found taste judgments were rated even more subjective than aesthetic judgments overall. Ratings of aesthetic judgments were unaffected by information indicating that the artworks said to be better enjoyed wide acclaim and/or had stood the test of time. And the sta­ tistical independence of the judgment domain and comparison order effects shows that participants did not simply misunderstand the task and rate their agreement with the statement. If they had, they would have rated all normative judgments highly objective and all nonnormative judgments highly subjective, regardless of domain. Still, the anomalous lack of comparison order effect for aesthetic judgments may be due to participants conflating the objectivity of a judgment domain with the truth of the judgment itself, despite the experimental instructions not to do so. Since the artwork titles were fictional, aesthetic judgments had no content, so participants could have treated all aesthetic judgments as false and thus equally subjective.

Moreover, judgments were presented without images. According to the acquaintance principle (Wollheim, 1980), aesthetic judgments are unique in requiring direct encounter with the objects of judgment. The belief that one painting is better than another can be formed only after seeing the paintings, whereas the belief that one planet is bigger than another can be formed indirectly, via testimony. Though not without its critics (Budd, 2003), this view is intuitively plausible, and some evi­ dence suggests it is shared by laypeople (Andow, 2019). So aesthetic judgments might seem more objective if people can assess their truth value by inspecting the objects of judgment. We examined this possi­ bility in Experiment 2. 5. Experiment 2 5.1. Participants Participants consisted of 209 U.S. adult Amazon Mechanical Turk 5

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recruits.

5.4. Discussion

5.2. Method

As before, epistemic beliefs differed by domain, and aesthetic judg­ ments were uniquely immune to the comparison order manipulation. This anomaly could be explained away in Experiment 1: Absent knowledge of the artworks, participants could have treated all aesthetic judgments as false and thus equally subjective (given the evidence of some confusion between objectivity and truth value) or assumed that the unseen artworks were highly similar (making both comparison orders equally subjective; Heiphetz & Young, 2017). Here, however, partici­ pants viewed the objects of judgment and could see their descriptive and evaluative differences, at least according to independent judges. This provides further evidence that aesthetic subjectivism is unusually robust to manipulation. We were unable to push participants towards objec­ tivity by showing them the artworks so that they could see for them­ selves that aesthetic judgments were describing real differences. Moreover, asking them to respond to statements in what we considered to be the normative order did not increase objectivity ratings even though it did for all other judgment domains. Still, it remains possible that our manipulations were too weak to increase aesthetic objectivism. Perhaps our participants did not consider any artwork better than the others even though an independent group of raters did, so the pattern was again caused by perceived equivalence rather than metaaesthetic beliefs. We examine this possibility in Experiment 3 by asking participants to judge comparative statements about artworks that they had previously said they liked or disliked.

To test the effect of presenting the judged images visually, we had participants rate statements either with or without accompanying im­ ages. The art images were taken from a set of twenty paintings used by Sanders et al. (2013). In that study, one group of participants (N ¼ 89) rated 20 abstract paintings for complexity (how busy the painting was) and geometry (how angular versus curvilinear), while another group (N ¼ 73) rated the beauty of the same paintings. Sanders and colleagues performed a multidimensional scaling analysis to examine complexity and geometry; for each of the twenty paintings, we averaged the complexity and geometry coordinates from their analysis and then averaged these with mean beauty ratings. The highest and lowest values from this procedure showed the works thought to be most different from one another on all of these dimensions. Adolph Gottlieb’s “Cadmium Red Over Black” and Robert Motherwell’s “Octavio Paz Suite: Nocturne VI” (least complex, geometric, and beautiful) were paired respectively with Wassily Kandinsky’s “Composition VII” and “Composition VIII” (most complex, geometric, and beautiful). We used abstract artworks to avoid confounding effects of representational content (e.g., people could interpret “better” to mean the object depicted in one work was more realistically depicted). The paintings were presented with the same fictional artist and artwork names used in Experiment 1 but without the consensus and test of time manipulations (see Table 1). The moral, taste, and fact items were identical to those in Experiment 1. Stock photo­ graphs accompanied each of these statements in the image condition. Thus, items in all four domains were accompanied by images. This design allowed us to test a hypothesis derived from the ac­ quaintance principle: Objectivity ratings of aesthetic statements should be higher in the image than the no image condition, which would be revealed by a main effect of image condition and either no interaction (if the effect of images on objectivity ratings cuts across judgment domains) or an interaction such that the effect of image condition on aesthetic statements is unique or larger than in other domains (as a strong reading of the acquaintance principle would predict). This design also tests whether objectivity ratings of aesthetic statements will be higher for normative than non-normative comparison orders; by the acquaintance principle, the images might allow people to “just see” that the statements are true or false and thus cause the comparison order effect that was absent in Experiment 1..

6. Experiment 3 6.1. Participants Participants consisted of 167 U.S. adult Amazon Mechanical Turk recruits. 6.2. Method The aim of Experiment 3 was to present statements comparing art­ works that participants themselves judged favorably with artworks that they disfavored. Participants first rated a series of 20 abstract paintings on a 1–7 scale (1 ¼ Dislike it a lot, 2 ¼ Dislike it a moderate amount, 3 ¼ Dislike it a little, 4 ¼ Neither like nor dislike, 5 ¼ Like it a little, 6 ¼ Like it a moderate amount, 7 ¼ Like it a lot). Fifteen of the paintings were taken from a monograph of contemporary abstract art (Nickas, 2009) and were selected to span four visual dimensions: many colors versus few, loose versus controlled, bright versus murky, complex versus simple. In case participants liked all of the contemporary works equally, we also included five paintings that had been created specifically to be unlikable by aggregating the least desirable art elements reported in large polls (Komar, Wypijewski, & Melamid, 1997). Next participants completed a modified version of the image condi­ tion task from Experiment 2. For each participant, the images shown above the aesthetic statements consisted of one painting that the participant had rated 6 or 7 and one that had been rated 1 or 2. Par­ ticipants responded to one statement claiming that a painting they liked a lot was better than a painting they did not like at all (normative comparison order) and one statement claiming that a painting they did not like at all was better than a painting they liked a lot (non-norma­ tive).2 Thus, comparison order was manipulated within- instead of between-participants. Fictional artist and artwork names were used. Each respondent rated four judgments (one per judgment domain) in the normative order and four (one per domain) in the non-normative order. Given the evidence that agreement with a statement increases ratings

5.3. Results A 4 (judgment domain) x 2 (comparison order) x 2 (image condition) ANOVA was performed. Against the acquaintance principle, image condition showed no main effect, F(1, 205) ¼ 0.14, p ¼ .709, ηp2 ¼ 0.001, or interaction with judgment domain (p ¼ .245); it also did not interact with comparison order (p ¼ .489), and no three way inter­ action was observed (p ¼ .259). Thus no predictions from the acquain­ tance principle were supported. A main effect of domain was found, F(3, 615) ¼ 424.04, p < .001, ηp2 ¼ 0.674, replicating the hierarchy found in Experiment 1, Mfact ¼ 6.01, Mmoral ¼ 2.55, Maesthetic ¼ 2.10, Mtaste ¼ 1.85, all pairwise comparisons, ps < .008; see Fig. 2. There was a main effect of comparison order, F(1, 205) ¼ 34.72, p < .001, ηp2 ¼ 0.145, Mnormative ¼ 3.50, Mnon-normative ¼ 2.76. Again this effect was tempered by an interaction with domain, F(3, 615) ¼ 13.22, p < .001, ηp2 ¼ 0.061, with aesthetic judgments unaffected by the com­ parison order manipulation, t(207) ¼ 0.37, p ¼ .714, d ¼ 0.05, unlike judgments of fact, t(207) ¼ 7.08, p < .001, d ¼ 0.97, morality, t (207) ¼ 4.71, p < .001, d ¼ 0.65, and taste, t(207) ¼ 2.57, p ¼ .011, d ¼ 0.36.

2 Participants who did not provide sufficiently extreme ratings (i.e., rated all paintings in the middle) were excluded from the analysis.

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of the objectivity of its domain, this experiment provides the strongest test yet of the stability of metaaesthetic subjecitivism. If people can be pushed to adopt aesthetic objectivism, then participants should rate aesthetic statements in the normative comparison order as more objec­ tive than those in the non-normative order, since the experiment is designed to ensure that participants agree with the former more than the latter. Hence there should no longer be an interaction between judgment domain and comparison order.

and regardless of comparison order (hence showing that they did not merely confuse their own agreement with a statement with its epistemic status). Most startlingly, these results remained even when the state­ ments reflected participants’ own evaluations: the judgments “[painting I really like] is better than [painting I really dislike]” and “[painting I really dislike] is better than [painting I really like]” were considered equally subjective. This remarkable inflexibility can be contrasted with beliefs about the objectivity of moral judgments; these beliefs vary under different circumstances (Beebe, 2014; Yilmaz & Bahçekapili, 2015), and in an interesting parallel, the judgments themselves are also more sus­ ceptible to situational influence in the moral than in the aesthetic domain (Rabb et al., 2016). We did not test epistemic beliefs about aesthetic judgments involving highly recognizable and presumably quite different works (e.g., “Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is better than Kin­ kade’s Christmas Memories”) because it is already known that consensus affects beliefs about objectivity (Goodwin & Darley, 2012; Solomon et al., 1984), a pattern clearly seen in our own results. Thus higher ob­ jectivity ratings of such statements would show nothing about aesthetics per se.

6.3. Results A 4 (judgment domain) x 2 (order of comparison) ANOVA revealed a main effect of judgment domain, F(3, 498) ¼ 407.71, p < .001, ηp2 ¼ 0.711, again replicating the familiar hierarchy, Mfact ¼ 5.78, Mmoral ¼ 2.59, Maesthetic ¼ 1.48, Mtaste ¼ 1.63, all pairwise comparisons, ps < .001, except taste/aesthetic, p ¼ .039; see Fig. 2. A main effect of comparison order, F(1, 166) ¼ 62.59, p < .001, ηp2 ¼ 0.274, Mnormative ¼ 3.21, Mnon-normative ¼ 2.53, was tempered by an interaction with domain, F(3, 498) ¼ 27.05, p < .001, ηp2 ¼ 0.140, due once again to a lack of effect for aesthetic judgments, t(166) ¼ 1.02, p ¼ .31, d ¼ 0.08, unlike judgments of fact, t(166) ¼ 7.97, p < .001, d ¼ 0.63, morality, t(166) ¼ 4.76, p < .001, d ¼ 0.37, and taste, t (166) ¼ 2.27, p ¼ .024, d ¼ 0.18.

7.1. Expressivism as a framework for understanding aesthetic judgments How, then, do we explain the apparent discrepancy between stable beliefs about the aesthetic domain (that judgments are subjective) and widely observed behaviors (that people argue about art and so on)? We propose that expressivism, a philosophical theory most famously considered in metaethics, is a plausible candidate explanation.3 We do not suggest that people believe expressivism per se, but rather that it provides a psychological framework for understanding these seemingly contradictory behaviors. The core idea of expressivism is that judgments reflect one’s attitudes or affective responses toward an object rather than ascriptions of veri­ fiable properties to that object, even though such judgments are typi­ cally expressed in the latter form. In other words, the judgment “that painting is good” ultimately expresses the speaker’s positive disposition toward the painting (“Yay for that painting!”) rather than some quality that inheres in it (as with, for instance, “that painting is square”). The appeal of applying this framework to aesthetic psychology is that it accounts for several features of aesthetic judgments—namely, that they are heterogeneous, consistent within individuals, and yet a cause of disagreement between individuals—while generating further poten­ tially fruitful research questions.

6.4. Discussion This experiment provides strong evidence for the robustness of aesthetic subjectivism. The objects of judgment were available for in­ spection, so equivalence of normative and non-normative aesthetic judgments was not due to participants treating judgments of both kinds as false or equally subjective because of assumptions about unseen ob­ jects. And in this case, judgments were constructed to match individual liking judgments, so participants presumably agreed and disagreed with the normative and non-normative aesthetic judgments, respectively, yet still considered them equally subjective. (It is an open question to what extent people equate liking with quality, but studies that have elicited both kinds of judgments find them to be fairly consistent; Hawley-Dolan & Winner, 2011.) This clear result is no fluke of averaging; examining individual response patterns revealed that only 10% of participants rated the aesthetic judgment matching their own preferences as more objective than the judgment asserting the opposite of their preferences. The sole difference between these and previous results was that overall ratings of aesthetic and taste judgments were only slightly different (p ¼ .026, padjusted ¼ .104). Perhaps the preference task made partici­ pants reflect on the subjective nature of evaluations, making aesthetic judgments seem unusually subjective. This possibility awaits further investigation.

7.1.1. Aesthetic judgments are heterogeneous If aesthetic judgments are expressions of individual attitudes or emotional responses rather than assessments of objective properties, then we would expect them to vary as widely as individual do. To examine this issue, we calculated mean pairwise inter-judge correlation coefficients for the paintings rated in Experiment 3 and found a remarkably low average correlation of 0.13. This pattern is not unusual. Similarly low mean inter-judge correlations (0.1–0.2) across aesthetic judgments have been reported in experiments featuring a variety of measures, populations, levels of expertise, and art types (Hekkert & Wieringen, 1996; Leder, Goller, Rigotti, & Forster, 2016; Russell & George, 1990; Russell, Gray, & Grey, 1991; Vessel, Stahl, Maurer, Denker, & Starr, 2014, p. 9014; Vessel & Rubin, 2010). Comparable findings are reported for aesthetic judgments of music (Martindale & Dailey, 1995) and poetry (Belfi, Vessel, & Starr, 2017). It might be thought that any kind of preference judgment will show this heteroge­ neity, i.e., that it is a feature of the question posed rather than the

7. General discussion In three experiments we showed that people consider aesthetic and taste judgments to be more subjective than moral and factual judgments even when we controlled for alternative explanations of similar patterns in previous studies (Cova & Pain, 2012; Goodwin & Darley, 2008, 2012). This is not surprising given common aphorisms like different strokes for different folks which likely reflect folk beliefs. Although cross-cultural (Beebe et al., 2015) and developmental (Beebe & Sackris, 2016) studies used stimuli that arguably prevented strong conclusions about aesthetics, the similarity across findings suggests that aesthetic subjec­ tivism is the norm, and a recent multi-national study reports consistent results (Cova et al., 2019). What is more surprising is that commitment to aesthetic subjectivism was unwavering despite increasingly strong countervailing pressures. People considered aesthetic judgments highly subjective despite learning that one of the two works enjoyed wide acclaim and/or had stood the test of time, despite being able to judge the artworks directly,

3 To our knowledge, only Todd (2004) has defended expressivism as a normative aesthetic theory, although Hopkins (2001) developed an expressivist account only to find it unsatisfactory, and both writers saw outlines of the view in Scruton (1974).

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domain of judgment. But a metaanalysis on preferences for human faces reported inter-judge correlations of ~0.9 (Langlois et al., 2000). Vessel, Maurer, Denker, and Starr (2018) directly compared preferences for faces, landscapes, architecture, and art, with similar results: While preferences for naturally occurring domains converged, presumably because of their biological relevance, preferences for aesthetic objects (paintings and architecture), which lack biological relevance,4 were highly individual. Judgments of representational as opposed to abstract artworks can shower higher mean correlations (0.3–0.4; Schepman, Rodway, Pullen, & Kirkham, 2015). But this only suggests that the represented content is driving agreement (see Levitan, Winfield, & Sherman, 2019), a possibility consistent with converging preferences for representational but not abstract art across childhood (Rodway, Kirk­ ham, Schepman, Lambert, & Locke, 2016).

statement about beauty as true, false, or neither true nor false were more likely to imply objectivist views under unusual circumstances. For example, participants were more likely to call the statement “that object is beautiful” false (albeit unintentionally false) when told that the speaker was on drugs and would not normally like that sort of object; in other words, the sense of beauty was caused by the drugs rather than the object. Similarly, stating that an object is beautiful while knowing a listener hates that sort of object is also judged false—in this case, intentionally false—because it implies the speaker believes the listener will find the object beautiful, and this is a false belief. Here participants are judging the truth value of an implied belief, rather than the truth value of a beauty judgment about an object; notably, however, a third of participants still rated these statements neither true nor false regardless of the listener’s disposition toward the object. A further question for expressivism as a psychological explanation of aesthetic judgment, and one that holds promise for future work, is why this state of affairs arose in the first place—how did an entire class of evaluative statements fall prey to what by some interpretations (San­ tayana, 1896/1986, x11; Todd, 2004) constitutes a categorical mistake? The case for expressivism in metaethics seems easier to make. The moral domain is vitally important to us given our dependence on social norms and cooperation for survival, and this importance could have necessi­ tated the adoption of objectivist language. By contrast, intractable disagreement about aesthetic judgments does not seem to threaten the fabric of society, and these judgments do not possess the same action-guiding quality as moral judgments (Kivy, 1980). The question can therefore be reframed as why aesthetic judgments are important enough to merit objectivist formulations. One plausible possibility is that aesthetic judgments may seem like an important part of our identity, and some empirical evidence supports this view. People admit to guilty pleasures from certain artworks, explaining that liking that kind of art did not fit their presentation of self—think for example of a professional classical musician liking country music (Goffin & Cova, 2019). Music preferences are both believed to and in fact do predict certain personality traits (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2006). And similarity in aesthetic judgments of visual art (Everett, Faber, & Crockett, 2015) and films (Gershman, Pouncy, & Gweon, 2017) can be used as a proxy for in-group membership, which presumably reflects important aspects of the self. This hypothesis could be probed in a manner similar to studies on moral beliefs and the self (Heiphetz, Strohminger, & Young, 2017). Although Heiphetz and col­ leagues found that abandoning preferences (including aesthetic judg­ ments) is thought to change the self less so than abandoning moral beliefs does, the difference was generally small (on a scale of 0–100% change to the person, roughly a 15% difference), and the aesthetic judgments said to have been abandoned were all hypothetical (e.g., “your favorite book”). Another, non-exclusive possibility is that engagement with art af­ fords a kind of playful or simulatory pattern detection that is highly useful because it lacks the potential costs of trial and error in real situ­ ations. Narrative fiction, for example, allows reflection on important patterns of social interaction at a safe remove (Mar & Oatley, 2008), and nonrepresentational artforms like music and abstract painting arguably do the same for patterns of emotional response (Langer, 1957; Winner, 2018, ch. 5; cf. Melcher & Bacci, 2013; (Sievers, Polansky, Casey, & Wheatley, 2013). Of course, these two possibilities could interact: An individual’s aesthetic judgments will seem to reflect her true self because they are in fact based on her pattern detection capacities, and similarities between her own and others’ aesthetic judgments therefore will be meaningful cues to similarities in their underlying capacities. Put less drily, people who like the same artworks “see the world” in the same way, at least on one score. This dynamic only reinforces the explanatory utility of expressivism, for we suspect that aesthetic disputes are most vehement among disputants who presume each other to be similar—close friends, family, members of the same community. Although these conflicts are

7.1.2. Aesthetic judgments are consistent within individuals Although expressivism predicts heterogeneous aesthetic judgments, it does not require that the subjective states underwriting aesthetic judgments be random. Individuals could have preferences and judgment strategies that are stable over time even if also idiosyncratic, since each individual’s unique suite of cognitive capacities and dispositions will make it more likely to respond with “yay!” to some things than others. This possibility feels intuitively right—surely most readers will recall liking the same artworks at multiple time points. And strategies for aesthetic judgments of music (Juslin, Sakka, Barradas, & Liljestr€ om, 2016) and visual art (Jacobsen, 2004) do indeed show consistency from one judgment to another even though they are highly individual. 7.1.3. Aesthetic judgments cause disputes To our knowledge, no one has investigated natural base rates of aesthetic disputes. But if anecdotes are representative and they are in fact common, then they are puzzling given the strong commitment (observed here) to the notion that aesthetic judgments are subjective. One might dismiss this as a puzzle by suggesting that people argue about art just for fun. But given how emotional such disputes can get, we think this is unlikely. Evers (2018) suggested a simple explanation: Not everyone believes aesthetic judgments are subjective, and only the objectivists argue. We cannot rule this out, but it seems doubtful given the rarity of objectivists in our data. Across all experiments, just 7% of participants’ mean ob­ jectivity ratings crossed the scale’s midpoint for the aesthetic domain, and 74.5% of these ratings fell between 1 and 2. Expressivism offers another explanation. Although the content of aesthetic judgments is ultimately an internal attitude or affective response, we may misconstrue aesthetic judgments as expressions about properties of the external object that caused the response. If so, then declaring “that painting is beautiful” will initially jar a companion who finds it ugly in much the same way that declaring “that painting is square” will vex the observer who clearly sees it to be round. Although people admit that aesthetic judgments are subjective, as they do in our and others’ studies, their initial intuition is otherwise precisely because of the shift we are positing from attitudes or emotions in the individual to ascriptions of properties inherent in the paintings themselves. 7.2. Conclusion Is there any way to push people more towards objectivism? Although we found no evidence that metaaesthetic beliefs are flexible, we note that in a recent study by Cova (2018), participants induced to judge a

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Some evolutionary accounts see artmaking as a fitness indicator for the purpose of sexual selection (Currie, 2011; Voland, 2003). This predicts sexually dimorphic preferences for artmakers, and there is convincing evidence of this (Gu�eguen, Meinieri, & Fischer-Lokou 2014). But it does not predict preferences for one or another artwork. 8

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stoked by the fact that judgments most people hold to be subjective are expressed in language that is just the opposite, they do reveal true and perhaps surprising differences, even though such differences inhere in the judges rather than the objects of judgment.

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