970x125
Co-authored with Vicente Estrada Gonzalez
Many encounters in everyday life seem to confirm the cliché, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Maybe your teenager plays an unbearably cheesy song repeatedly enough that you start questioning the idea of genetic inheritance. Or another person’s bizarre fashion choices leave you bewildered. Perhaps the art hanging in a friend’s living room repulses you, making you wonder if you really know who they are.
At the same time, many feel a strong intuition that some preferences are universal. Why do many people agree on which actors are attractive? Why do we trust Rotten Tomatoes ratings to guide our film choices? Why does the same sunset end up on hundreds of Instagram stories, with everyone silently agreeing with a click: Yes, this one is beautiful.
Aesthetic experience seems contradictory: deeply personal in some instances and oddly predictable in others. Research in empirical aesthetics helps us understand the nuances behind these seemingly at odds observations. The explanation, it turns out, depends partly on the nature of what we are looking at. People more often agree on the attractiveness of natural objects like faces and landscapes. Human-made artifacts like buildings and artworks evoke more varied reactions (Vessel et al., 2018). Probing agreement in liking further, a question arises: Even when we agree, what are we agreeing about?
When We Like the Same Thing, Do We Feel the Same Way?
We recently published a study in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences in which we asked a deceptively simple question: When two people like the same artwork, are they having the same experience (Estrada Gonzalez et al., 2026)?
To investigate this question, participants in Philadelphia viewed artworks from the Barnes Foundation and artifacts from the Penn Museum, spending one minute with each object. After the encounters, they answered the question asked most often 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 the experience rarely ends with these broad assessments.
To go beyond beauty and liking, we asked participants to describe how each piece affected them using a vocabulary of 69 terms developed in our lab to capture the richness of aesthetic experience (Christensen et al., 2023). Some of these experiences are immediate and emotional: feeling pleasure or calm, or even feeling angry and upset. Others unfold more slowly, perhaps requiring greater reflection: feeling absorbed, inspired, enlightened, or enraptured.
Same Painting, Different Worlds
Imagine two friends in New York visiting the Guggenheim Museum. Both pause in front of Kandinsky’s Composition 8 longer than in front of other paintings. They nod and agree: “This is good stuff.”
Later over coffee, the painting comes up in conversation. Both agree that they liked the harmony of geometric forms, the balance of the composition, and the restrained use of colors. Then, one reveals something more personal. When looking at the painting, they remembered their high-school teacher explaining Kandinsky’s synesthesia and his fascination with the relationship between color, form, and music. The painting was tied to a memory, an idea, and a fleeting but powerful feeling of discovery. Both friends found the painting beautiful. But personal histories pushed the experiences in different directions. Some aspects of aesthetic experience are shared. Others depend on what each person brings to the encounter: memories, knowledge, associations, emotions evoked, and meanings that emerge.
Agreement Fades as Experience Deepens
This intuition is precisely 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 across viewers.
The results followed a clear pattern. People agreed most when judging beauty and liking, with an agreement score of 0.43. Agreement was lower for positive emotional responses, such as pleasure or calmness, at 0.30. It dropped further for negative emotions, such as feeling upset or challenged, at 0.19. The lowest agreement appeared for experiences that we think need more time and reflection to emerge (e.g., feeling inspired, enlightened, or deeply absorbed), which were around 0.11.
In everyday terms, these observations mean that two people might agree that a painting is beautiful in much the same way they agree that a sunset is worth photographing or that red roses are right on Valentine’s Day. But what the painting does to them—whether it absorbs, enchants, or feels transformative—is where differences emerge.
Buried in similar likings of works of art, there can be different experiential routes that give rise to that liking.
