Balance and mechanisms of shared and individual aesthetic values.

Abstract

In a seminal article, Hönekopp set up rigorous criteria to understand when aesthetic values had individual versus shared bases. Using these criteria, he showed that the dichotomy between private and shared values was in balance. With this result, he gave a scientific answer to a debate that raged on for millennia. Unsurprisingly, therefore, his methods and results influenced scholars across a variety of fields, including psychology, cognitive and computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, arts, fashion, and architecture. Later studies revealed that shared values were in part genetic. Their other components included, among others, social biases and interpersonal relations. Interestingly, the social basis of shared values extended even to social polarization, something that our sense of beauty had in common with other domains of society. In turn, individual aesthetic values also had genetic components. Similarly, learning played a role in the individuation of aesthetic values in part by using signals from our bodies, which are so different across individuals. Another source of individuation stemmed from natural learning being stochastic and chaotic, and having a high-dimensional space of values, allowing for multiple outcomes. Thus, Hönekopp's influential results of balance between individual versus shared values extended to the similarity of their underlying mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).