Bad beauty: Aesthetic judgments are influenced by references to morally contentious content in photographs

Abstract

Affective responses can influence evaluative judgments, but how are subjective beauty ratings affected by references to morally contentious elements in aesthetic stimuli? In an online experiment (N = 460), we investigated the relationship between two types of descriptive texts (Neutral vs. Negative) and the beauty ratings of 25 photographs that depict sources of environmental pollution. For each photograph, the neutral descriptive text contained general information, whereas the negative descriptive text addressed the pollution source. Further, we explored whether this relationship is mediated by changes in positive and negative affect, and how it interacts with the biospheric values of participants. Our results showed that (1) participants in the Negative Condition rated the photographs as less beautiful than in the Neutral Condition, (2) this relationship was partially mediated by changes in negative affect, and (3) in the Negative Condition, participants with higher levels of biospheric values rated the photographs as less beautiful. Our results indicate that individual values, as well as affective responses induced by aesthetic stimuli, directly influence subjective beauty. This aligns with current theoretical frameworks and fills a gap in experimental research. Finally, we discuss limitations and directions for future studies.