Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We make aesthetic judgments on a daily basis. While we think of these judgments as highly personal, they are often shaped by social context. This poses a computational problem: how do we combine social information and our individual judgments to produce a single evaluation? In this study, we examine social influence on aesthetic evaluations in online transmission chain experiments. We test not only the effect of social information, but also variation in effect depending on how information is presented--echoing the variety of interfaces we encounter in naturalistic cases. We find that social information significantly affects ratings across interfaces. Moreover, people tend to rely more heavily on their own judgment than on social information, compared to an ideally noise-reducing model for combining multiple signals. These results offer detailed insight into the formation of aesthetic judgment and suggest the need for extended investigation into social influence on subjective judgments more broadly.