The Different Types and Values of Beauty
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
are there different types of beauty? The research in aesthetics is focused pretty much on a unspecified notion of beauty, so we proceed under the assumption that there are different types of beauty. We specifically addressed the distinction between four categories of aesthetic appeal,
00:23
namely beauty, elegance, grace, and sexiness. Grace is a kind of old-fashioned term that was very important in classical philosophical aesthetics, has been completely neglected in recent research. Elegance, surprisingly, has not been the subject of a single empirical study to date.
00:43
Essentially, also, there is no theoretical study on elegance available as of now, so we tried to distinguish these types of appeal under the assumption that they are all sub-variants of the broader notion of beauty.
01:04
So the founding figure of empirical aesthetics, the German psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner, maintained that it is very important for aesthetics to use a bottom-up approach, that is, to look at what actual recipients believe
01:22
rather than to follow well-established philosophical assumptions. This is exactly what we did. So we picked up the mental model. Individuals have developed over time of their notion of elegance, of grace, of beauty, and sexiness. This method has two aspects.
01:42
On the one hand, it is exploratory, because in the absence of any theory of elegance, you cannot reasonably predict all dimensions of the perception of elegance, so you develop all sorts of anticipations based on historical discourses on elegance. These anticipations underlie the selection
02:02
of the scales you use. That's a classical method. But there is no top-down, strictly logical approach to it from a theory to the question. Ours is a groundbreaking study that sorts out basic semantics of the field,
02:21
but we also go beyond the understanding of the object end in that we ask the question, which associations do elegant objects trigger in the perceiver? Which values actually are attached to specific aesthetic virtues?
02:41
We try to go into the deeper structure of what constitutes the value and which emotions and which response dimensions it elicits in recipients. Looking at these four concepts,
03:00
again, beauty, elegance, sexiness, and grace, it turns out that the most common denominator is obviously beauty. Beauty has a strong overlap with all three other categories. So we have a map, more or less a mind map of these four terms.
03:21
First of all, we looked into the deep structure, so to speak, of the very construct of elegance. And it turns out that it has a strong overlap with beauty in that typically elegant things are also beautiful, but it is distinct from beauty in that it has a pronounced element
03:41
of cultural sophistication about it. On top of that, there is something like an intellectual rigor in beauty. This comes along with a notion of a profound simplicity. Just think about an elegant dress or think about an elegant bridge spanning over miles,
04:03
but looking like it's a very simple, easy, straightforward thing. Another dimension is kind of a restrained emotionality. Elegance is not hot. It's rather a sober category. We also looked into dimensions
04:22
associated with elegant persons. So it turns out that those who are perceived as elegant also enjoy a number of other advantages associations. For instance, they are considered to be conscientious,
04:43
to be intelligent, and to take, actually even to take care of other people. At the same time, they are supposed to be a little bit upper classy. They are supposed to be successful. All these things come into play
05:01
if people look at elegant persons. These are the main findings we made regarding the inherent values associated with elegance. And regarding grace, the important thing is that gracefulness is also available to children and to animals.
05:23
So gracefulness is very similar to elegance with the exception that it doesn't involve cultural sophistication, and it doesn't involve intellectual austerity and this type of emotional restraint.
05:41
But other than that, object-wise, graceful movements of children are very similar to elegant movements of adult persons. Obviously, sexiness is not dependent on cultural sophistication to the same degree as elegance is. It is not dependent on emotional restraint.
06:02
It's obviously a hot category, whereas elegance can even be a cold category with a reduced temperature. So to some extent, sexiness is within this spectrum, the very opposite of elegance. In our effort to dissociate elegance and beauty,
06:22
we also looked into the age distribution between elegance, sexiness, and grace in individual appearance. And it turns out that there is a major difference regarding age distributions. I mean, not surprisingly,
06:43
sexiness attributions develop more or less at the age of 15, 16, and they rapidly surge. By that time, you find almost no elegance attribution. And the very interesting thing about elegance is that it reaches peak levels
07:00
only far much later in age than beauty and sexiness. And in fact, to some extent, one could say that elegance is a kind of age indifferent type of beauty in that it extends into the highest age of individuals, such that a lady can be called elegant even at age 90.
07:24
And so we have defined, so to speak, the time windows in which people are perceived as sexy, beautiful, and elegant in our study. There is research which I personally find very important
07:44
on negative associations of person perceptions with beauty attributions. You may be aware of the fact that everyone feels like she or he has to be beautiful, but there's also downsides to it.
08:00
Specifically, there's a negative correlation regarding beauty between social competence and beauty. And in many ways, persons of outstanding beauty are conceived of as being, I mean, self-centered, as being not generous to other persons,
08:21
and as being, to some extent, difficult. That's something that already Sigmund Freud has reported. And now for elegance, however, we do find very different results. Interestingly, we find that persons of elegance enjoy the attribution not only of high intelligence
08:42
and social standing, but also of positive social virtues. I have to admit, this was kind of surprising to me, but the result is fairly robust. We have already started research
09:03
that looks into a broader picture. In this case, we also include the very opposite of elegance. In our understanding, it's actually kitsch. Elegance is the most austere type of beauty. Kitsch is the least austere type of beauty.
09:20
And we look into the neural underpinnings of these two types of beauty. Hopefully, that will enable us to debunk, to some extent, the notion that beauty is a kind of homogenous entity. People associate kitsch clearly with beautiful,
09:40
and they also associate elegance with beautiful. Now, what we do is we develop a normed stimulus set, a collection of items which are rated as either kitschy or elegant or beautiful by most people. So that is, we need a convergent perception
10:02
of a set of stimuli. Once we have secured that stimulus set, we have a good basis for investigating in a more theoretical fashion. So what we did in a more explorative fashion in our very first study on elegance.