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Journal article
Evidence that the aesthetic preference for Hogarth's Line of Beauty is an evolutionary by-product
Scientific reports, Vol.13(1), Art. 4134
2023
PMID: 36914706
Abstract
In 1753, artist William Hogarth declared a specific S-shaped line to be the 'Line of Beauty' (LoB). Hogarth's assertion has had a profound impact on diverse fields over the past two and a half centuries. However, only one recent (2022) study has investigated whether Hogarth's assertion accurately captures humans' actual aesthetic preferences, and no research has explored why people find the LoB beautiful. We conducted two studies testing the hypothesis that the LoB's perceived beauty is an incidental by-product of cognitive systems that evolved to attend to fitness-relevant morphological features in people. In Study 1, we replicated the finding that female bodies whose lumbar curvature approximates the biomechanical optimum for dealing with the exigencies of pregnancy are rated as more attractive. In Study 2, we found that abstract lines extracted from these bodies were perceived as more beautiful than other lines. These results suggest that the preference for Hogarth's LoB is an incidental by-product of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other purposes. More broadly, these findings suggest that an evolutionary psychological approach - in particular the concept of evolutionary by-product - may be useful for understanding, explaining, and predicting people's aesthetic preferences for certain abstract symbols, which otherwise might seem arbitrary and inexplicable.
Details
- Title
- Evidence that the aesthetic preference for Hogarth's Line of Beauty is an evolutionary by-product
- Authors/Creators
- Ronald Hübner - University of KonstanzDavid M G Lewis - Murdoch University, Centre for Healthy AgeingLaith Al-Shawaf - Psychology Department, University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs, USAAyten Yesim Semchenko - Charles UniversityJonathon Flores - University of Houston
- Publication Details
- Scientific reports, Vol.13(1), Art. 4134
- Publisher
- Springer Nature
- Identifiers
- 991005568770107891
- Copyright
- © 2023 The Author(s)
- Murdoch Affiliation
- Centre for Healthy Ageing
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Citation topics
- 6 Social Sciences
- 6.73 Social Psychology
- 6.73.1369 Evolutionary Psychology
- Web Of Science research areas
- Multidisciplinary Sciences
- ESI research areas
- Psychiatry/Psychology