The Temporal Instability of Aesthetic Preferences

What happens to aesthetic preferences over time? Everyday experience suggests that our preferences change over the course of our lives. Unfortunately, much of the existing research on aesthetics only measures preferences once, and therefore cannot capture these changes. A handful of studies that have measured aesthetic preferences at multiple moments show that preferences may change in as little as two weeks. However, the dynamics of these changes remain unclear. A thorough investigation of how aesthetic preferences change across multiple time points is needed. In this study, we measured aesthetic preferences for different colored objects at six-time points, spanning a month. We found that aesthetic preferences were not stable and tended to drift stochastically over time. Small statistically significant drifts occurred already after 20 min, and large ones happened after 2 weeks. Intriguingly, making more choices stabilized preferences for roughly 20% of participants, possibly due to learning. In addition, we found that the instability of aesthetic preferences could be explained by different factors related to the stimuli and participants. For example, instability was greater for "hard" choices between colors that were close in chromatic space as well as in their average preference rank. Males were more unstable than females, and instability tended to decrease with age. Surprisingly, no personality traits were found to correlate with how the participants' aesthetic preferences changed over time. Overall, these findings suggest not only that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but also that the beholder is constantly changing as well.