Your spacecraft is spiralling out of control, and you will hit planet Arakis unless you fire up the thermal after-boosters. Which of the two buttons below would help you fire up the boosters on time? Would you be more likely to survive if the cockpit designer had installed the button on the left or the right?

If you picked the left button, congratulations! Science suggests you might have just survived the crash landing. But what is it about these buttons that made you pick one button over the other?

The short answer is beauty, with the button on the left being more aesthetically appealing than the one on the right – making us spot it quicker. That may seem surprising. But beauty is more important to us than we tend to realise. As the poet John Keats put it: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know.”

How much we like something and how beautiful we find it, can have a compelling effect on our experience and behaviour. Research shows that when we see beautiful things – be it a person, a painting or a kettle – we attribute a whole host of positive affectations to them like truth, innocence and efficiency.

Beauty emerges from different properties of the loved thing. Sure, though there is a certain degree of subjectivity in what we like – I may love something that you don’t – but, when it comes to beauty, there are some well-established properties that matter.

These include certain properties of the object itself, such as proportion,........

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