Preferability,Pleasingness,and Interestingness: Relationships between Evaluative Judgements in Empirical Aesthetics

Abstract

Using evaluative rating scales, different groups of subjects made judgments of the preferability, pleasingness and interestingness of three types of stimuli: colors, music, and surnames. For all three types, preferability was strongly positively correlated with pleasingness. For the colors and music, preferability was also positively correlated with interestingness. For surnames, however, preferability was weakly and negatively correlated with interestingness. Also for surnames, the preferability judgments of different subjects were related in different ways to pleasingness and interestingness. For example, the preferability judgments of some subjects were strongly related to pleasingness while the those of others were not. Also, the former subjects tended to prefer low interestingness names, while the latters' preferences were unrelated to interestingness. The results have implications for the comparability of studies using different evaluative scales and for the future choice of scales. It is suggested that difficulties may attach to the commonly-used preferability scale.