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Abstract

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.