Aesthetic experiences can be both variable and predictable.

Shared preference does not necessarily mean shared experience.

Beyond beauty lie immersive and potentially transformative experiences that differ between people.

Co-authored with Vicente Estrada Gonzalez

Many encounters in everyday life seem to confirm the cliché, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Maybe your teenager plays an unbearably cheesy song repeatedly enough that you start questioning the idea of genetic inheritance. Or another person’s bizarre fashion choices leave you bewildered. Perhaps the art hanging in a friend’s living room repulses you, making you wonder if you really know who they are.

At the same time, many feel a strong intuition that some preferences are universal. Why do many people agree on which actors are attractive? Why do we trust Rotten Tomatoes ratings to guide our film choices? Why does the same sunset end up on hundreds of Instagram stories, with everyone silently agreeing with a click: Yes, this one is beautiful.

Aesthetic experience seems contradictory: deeply personal in some instances and oddly predictable in others. Research in empirical aesthetics helps us understand the nuances behind these seemingly at odds observations. The explanation, it turns out, depends partly on the nature of what we are looking at. People more often agree on the attractiveness of natural objects like faces and landscapes. Human-made artifacts like buildings and artworks evoke more varied........

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