Levitan, Winfield, and Sherman evaluated responses to representational visual art and found, not surprisingly, that people prefer paintings whose subject matter they like. The Levitan team reports that “Prior research has demonstrated that color preferences are driven by preferences for objects associated with those colors (e.g., that the sky is blue or that feces are brown influences preferences for blue and brown; Palmer & Schloss, 2010). . . .
Controlling without disrupting seems best
Some options are clearly better than others
Miller and Hubner found that individuals are pretty good at determining if other people will like a particular piece of art. The duo reports that “Aesthetic preferences vary strongly between people. Yet, it can be essential to infer what other people aesthetically prefer. Therefore, we investigated lay people’s ability to infer aesthetic preferences. . . . about half of the participants produced a significant medium to high correlation between their other assessments and the mean others′ self-assessment. . . .
Just, Nichols, and Dunn evaluated indoor climates across the United States. They studied “indoor climate data from homes . . . across the USA. We then compared these data to recent global terrestrial climate data (0.5° grid cells, n = 67 420) using a climate dissimilarity index. . . . On average, our study homes were most similar in climate to the outdoor conditions of west central Kenya. . . .
Scaling and contrast investigated
Appel-Meulenbroek and colleagues collected information from workers born into different generations to learn more about perceived workplace design-related needs and preferences. The variations they identified were present at the time that their research was conducted and may or may not persist as members of various generations age. The investigators defined Baby Boomers as born from 1946 – 1964, members of Generation X as being born from 1965 – 1979, and Millennials as born 1980 – 1998. Data were obtained from hundreds of Dutch office employees who are members of one of the three generat
Gruner and colleagues add to our understanding of location-related factors that influence the evaluations of artworks. They determined that “artworks presented in a museum were liked more and rated more interesting than in the laboratory.”
Susanne Gruner, Eva Specker, and Helmut Leder. “Effects of Context and Genuineness in the Experience of Art.” Empirical Studies of the Arts,in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/0276237418822896
Helping low-income residents feel good about urban parks
Wu, Moore, and Fitzsimons studied decision-making. They investigated “how consumers make unilateral decisions on behalf of the self and multiple others, in situations where the chosen option will be shared and consumed jointly by the group—for instance, choosing wine for the table. Results across six studies using three different choice contexts (wine, books, and movies) demonstrate that such choices are shaped by the decision-maker’s self-construal (independent versus interdependent) and by the size of the group being chosen for (large versus small). Specifically, we find that interdepend
