Some experimental studies of familiarity and liking

Abstract

What is aesthetically pleasing and why? The answers to this question have immense practical implications for people such as advertisers, educators and broad­casters, as well as great theoretical importance for researchers in the social sciences. The question can be approached from a variety of different viewpoints; the sociologist, for example, might concentrate upon the role of social class or the mass media in shaping people's likes and dislikes, and the anthropologist might undertake cross-cultural comparisons. In the absence of any consistent body of theory on aesthetic preferences in any of these other disciplines. the approach of the experimental psychologist has been to collect data on human preferences in a systematic manner and to develop a theory which is congruent with the empirical findings. Our own attempts at this have developed along new lines, and therefore there is no closely related literature to be surveyed alongside our own work. However, some observations about the historical background of our studies will be useful at the outset. The 19th-century experimental aesthetics ran into difficulty in its endeavour to establish a body of consistent data (Boring. 1957); and so its theories, although very interesting. remained speculative. Thus, aesthetics continued to be on the fringe of psychology (Mace, 1962) until the birth of so-called new experi­mental aesthetics a decade or so ago. Berlyne (1974) showed new ways forward along experimental paths; and he also tried to root aesthetics in biology (Ber­Iyne, 1971). In the meanwhile Zajonc (1968) drew attention to the effects of