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Abstract

Music production is a universal phenomenon reaching far back into our past. Given its ubiquity, evolution theorists have postulated adaptive functions for music, such as strengthening in-group cohesion, intimidating enemies, or promoting child bonding. Here, we focus on a longstanding Darwinian hypothesis, suggesting that music production evolved as a vehicle to display an individual’s biological fitness in courtship competition, thus rendering musicality a sexually selected trait. We also extend this idea to visual artists. In our design, we employed different versions of naturalistic portraits that manipulated the presence or absence of visual cues suggesting that the person was an artist or a non-artist (e.g., farmer, teacher, physician). Participants rated each portrayed person’s appeal on multiple scales, including attractiveness, interestingness, sympathy, and trustworthiness. Difference scores between portrait versions revealed the impact of the artistic/non-artistic visual cues. We thus tested Darwin’s hypothesis on both a within-subject and within-stimulus level. In addition to this implicit approach, we collected explicit ratings on the appeal of artists versus non-artists. The results demonstrate divergent findings for both types of data, with only the explicit statements corroborating Darwin’s hypothesis. We discuss this divergence in detail, along with the particular role of interestingness revealed by the implicit data.