UC San Diego

The ability to infer others' prosocial vs. antisocial behavioral tendencies from minimal information is core to social reasoning. Aesthetic motivation (the value or appreciation of aesthetic beauty) is linked with prosocial tendencies, raising the question of whether this factor is used in interpersonal reasoning and in the attribution of mental capacities. We propose and test a model of this reasoning, predicting that evidence of others' aesthetic motivations should impact judgments of others' prosocial (and antisocial) tendencies by signaling a heightened capacity for emotional experience. In a series of four pre-registered experiments (total N = 1440), participants saw pairs of characters (as photos/vignettes), and judged which in each pair showed more of a mental capacity of interest. Distractor items prevented participants from guessing the hypothesis. For one critical pair of characters, both characters performed the same activity (music listening, painting, cooking, exercising, being in nature, doing math), but one was motivated by the activities' aesthetic value, and the other by its functional value. Across all activities, participants robustly chose aesthetically-motivated characters as more likely to behave compassionately (Exp. 1; 3), less likely to behave selfishly/manipulatively (Exp. 1; 3), and as more emotionally sensitive, but not more intelligent (Exp. 2; 3; 4). Emotional sensitivity best predicted compassionate behavior judgements (Exp. 3). Aesthetically-motivated characters were not reliably chosen as more helpful; intelligence best predicted helpfulness judgements (Exp. 4). Evidence of aesthetic motivation conveys important social information about others, impacting fundamental interpersonal judgments about others' mental life and social behavior.