Co-authored with Vicente Estrada Gonzalez
Many encounters in everyday life confirm the cliché that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. Maybe you teenager plays the haunting song over and over enough that you start to question the idea of genetic inheritance. Or another person’s amazing fashion choices will leave you in awe. The art hanging in your friend’s room will probably throw you off and make you wonder if you really know who they are.
At the same time, many people feel strong intuition that some preferences are universal. Why do so many agree on which actors are attractive? Why do we trust Rotten Tomatoes ratings to guide our movie choices? Why the same sunset reaches hundreds Instagram stories where everyone silently agrees with the click: Yes, it’s beautiful.
Aesthetic experience seems contradictory: deeply personal in some cases and strangely predictable in others. Research in empirical aesthetics helps us understand the nuances behind these seemingly contradictory observations. The explanation, it turns out, depends in part on the nature of what we see. People are more likely to agree with this attractiveness natural objects such as faces and landscapes. Human-made artifacts such as buildings and works of art evoke different responses (Vessel et al., 2018). Examining conformity in liking begs the question: Even when we agree, what are we? about?
When we love the same thing, do we feel the same way?
We recently published a study in the journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences in which we asked a deceptively simple question: When two people like the same work, do they have the same experience (Estrada Gonzalez et al., 2026)?
To investigate this question, participants visited the Barnes Foundation and the Penn Museum of Art in Philadelphia, spending one minute with each object. After the meetings, they answered the most frequently asked question in empirical studies of aesthetic experience: Do you like it? Do you find it beautiful? Anyone who has ever stood in front of a powerful work of art knows that the experience rarely ends with these broad assessments.
To go beyond beauty and liking, we asked participants to describe how each piece represented to them using a vocabulary of 69 terms developed in our lab to capture the richness of the aesthetic experience (Christensen et al., 2023). Some of these experiences are immediate and emotional: feelings of pleasure or calmness, or even feelings of anger and discomfort. Others develop more slowly, perhaps requiring more reflection: feeling immersed, inspired, enlightened or encouraged.
Same picture, different worlds
Imagine two friends visiting the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Both stop in front of Kandinsky Composition 8 longer than the front of other pictures. They nod and agree: “This is a good thing.»
After coffee, the picture appears in the conversation. Both agreed that they liked the harmony of geometric shapes, the balance of the composition and the limited use of colors. Then one reveals something more personal. When they looked at the picture, they remembered a high school teacher explaining a Kandinsky painting. synesthesia and his fascination with the relationship between color, form and music. Picture to A memorythe fleeting but powerful idea and feeling of discovery. Both friends found the picture beautiful. But personal history pushed experiences in different directions. Some aspects of aesthetic experience are shared. Others depend on what each person brings to the meeting: memories, knowledge, associations, emotions evoked, and meanings that emerge.
The agreement fades as the experience deepens
This intuition is exactly what we found in our study. We quantified agreement for each aesthetic term on a scale from −1 to 1, where 1 indicates perfect agreement, 0 indicates no shared agreement, and negative values indicate opposite responses among viewers.
The results were clearly realized. People agreed the most when rating cuteness and likability with a 0.43 concordance score. Agreement for positive emotional responses, such as pleasure or relaxation, was lower at 0.30. It decreased at 0.19 for negative emotions, such as feeling upset or troubled. The lowest agreement was found for experiences that we thought required more time and reflection to occur (e.g., feeling inspired, enlightened, or deeply immersed), which was around 0.11.
In everyday terms, these observations mean that two people can agree that a picture is beautiful, just as they agree that a sunset is worth photographing or that a red rose is appropriate for Valentine’s Day. But what the painting does to them—whether it’s captivating, bewitching, or transformative—is where the differences come in.
Buried in the likes of works of art, there may be different experiential ways that lead to likes.
