Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver's Processing Experience?
Reber, Schwarz and Winkielman propose that beauty is not a property sitting in the object but a report on the viewer's own processing. Their claim is that the more easily a thing is taken in, the more pleasant the experience of taking it in, and that this pleasure gets attributed to the object as beauty. The evidence they assemble is that the features long known to make things appealing, good figure, contrast between figure and ground, symmetry, repetition and typicality, are all features that make an object easier to process. They then run the argument the other way: manipulations that have nothing to do with the object's own qualities, such as having recently seen something similar or having the idea primed, also increase how attractive it is judged to be. The framework ties together early, seemingly universal preferences and the acquired preferences produced by exposure and culture, since familiarity is itself a route to fluency. It is a review and theoretical synthesis rather than a single experiment.
Reber, Schwarz and Winkielman propose that beauty is not a property sitting in the object but a report on the viewer's own processing. Their claim is that the more easily a thing is taken in, the more pleasant the experience of taking it in, and that this pleasure gets attributed to the object as beauty. The evidence they assemble is that the features long known to make things appealing, good figure, contrast between figure and ground, symmetry, repetition and typicality, are all features that make an object easier to process. They then run the argument the other way: manipulations that have nothing to do with the object's own qualities, such as having recently seen something similar or having the idea primed, also increase how attractive it is judged to be. The framework ties together early, seemingly universal preferences and the acquired preferences produced by exposure and culture, since familiarity is itself a route to fluency. It is a review and theoretical synthesis rather than a single experiment.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
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Fluency feeds aesthetic response and also non-aesthetic judgments, including judgments of truth.
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- Never Show a Fool Your Work Until It Is Complete, Why We Work
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The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3
DOI: 10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3