Evidence that the aesthetic preference for Hogarth's Line of Beauty is an evolutionary by-product
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11310%2F23%3A10480022" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11310/23:10480022 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=uR5Jb2.WrE" target="_blank" >https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=uR5Jb2.WrE</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-31175-w" target="_blank" >10.1038/s41598-023-31175-w</a>
Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Evidence that the aesthetic preference for Hogarth's Line of Beauty is an evolutionary by-product
Original language description
In 1753, artist William Hogarth declared a specific S-shaped line to be the 'Line of Beauty' (LoB). Hogarth's assertion has had a profound impact on diverse fields over the past two and a half centuries. However, only one recent (2022) study has investigated whether Hogarth's assertion accurately captures humans' actual aesthetic preferences, and no research has explored why people find the LoB beautiful. We conducted two studies testing the hypothesis that the LoB's perceived beauty is an incidental by-product of cognitive systems that evolved to attend to fitness-relevant morphological features in people. In Study 1, we replicated the finding that female bodies whose lumbar curvature approximates the biomechanical optimum for dealing with the exigencies of pregnancy are rated as more attractive. In Study 2, we found that abstract lines extracted from these bodies were perceived as more beautiful than other lines. These results suggest that the preference for Hogarth's LoB is an incidental by-product of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other purposes. More broadly, these findings suggest that an evolutionary psychological approach - in particular the concept of evolutionary by-product - may be useful for understanding, explaining, and predicting people's aesthetic preferences for certain abstract symbols, which otherwise might seem arbitrary and inexplicable.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Classification
Type
J<sub>imp</sub> - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
10602 - Biology (theoretical, mathematical, thermal, cryobiology, biological rhythm), Evolutionary biology
Result continuities
Project
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Continuities
I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace
Others
Publication year
2023
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů
Data specific for result type
Name of the periodical
Scientific Reports
ISSN
2045-2322
e-ISSN
2045-2322
Volume of the periodical
13
Issue of the periodical within the volume
1
Country of publishing house
GB - UNITED KINGDOM
Number of pages
9
Pages from-to
4134
UT code for WoS article
000988825800043
EID of the result in the Scopus database
2-s2.0-85150090956