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

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