Preference for Abstract Art According to Thinking Styles and Personality

A number of psychologists have not accepted the old adage that there is no accounting for taste. They have conducted investigations regarding links between personality, thinking style, and preferences. The following discussion summarizes highlights of their work, and it offers new interpretations and future directions to be pursued, particularly with respect to preferences for art. Cross-Cultural Trends in Art Preferences To begin considering what underlies preferences for let us first examine the relative popularity of art. Something you can go out and see in the real world is the subject of representational art. The designation abstract art ranges from distortions of familiar figures to entire canvases occupied by drips and color fields. In museum tours, showing 76 original oil paintings that ran from the 15th century through the 20th century, from Giovani Bellini to Pablo Picasso, Rump and Southgate (1967) found their 139 participants preferred pictures realistically depicting familiar objects. The City of Toronto (Cameron, 1970) ran a public opinion poll, asking a representative sample of 500 metropolitan Toronto residents to view, rank according to preference, and comment on reproductions of 220 paintings. Finding no relation between any demographics and style preferences and no relation between training and style preferences, the investigators found the most paintings (by Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock, for instance) were the least liked and the most representational paintings (by Auguste Renoir and Andrew Wyeth, for example) were the most liked. They were particularly rejecting of works that distorted familiar objects, especially the female body, or that represented religious subjects nontraditionally. Only 14% of the Toronto sample preferred to representational art. No personality questions were asked. Therefore, we do not know whether individual differences in personality or thinking style were associated with differences in preferences. Complementary to the results of Cameron's (1970) survey, the team of Komar and Melamid (1997) found that preference trends are rather consistent across cultures. Their work represented a massive series of studies with over 10,000 interviewees, sampled from China, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, France, Denmark, America, Finland, Canada, Iceland, and Kenya. They found the most popular subjects were landscapes, then animals and people. Representative was generally preferred over art. The least preferred shapes and forms were arrangements. The most preferred forms were playful designs with soft curves, and cheerful content that are relaxing to look at. Considerable variation in preferences did exist, however. For instance, to say that the most popular color in a particular country was blue, might mean only that 18 percent of those surveyed chose blue first, while all other colors received endorsements of less than 18 percent. Preference differences between participants in the Toronto study and between participants in the surveys of Komar and Melamid (1997) lead us to ask how we might account for the diversity of preferences. Since neither Cameron nor the team of Komar and Melamid asked any questions regarding personality or thinking styles we do not know whether individual preferences corresponded in any way to personality traits or thinking styles. Dissonance, Psychoticism, and Preferences for Music and Art Several attempts to specify underlying psychological processes in visual preferences have been limited by their lack of personality questions, as in the surveys of Cameron (1970) and Komar and Melamid (1997). For example, the usefulness of a study by Morriss and Dunlap (1988), addressed by Martindale (2001), is also limited by the absence of personality and thinking style measures on the participants. Morriss and Dunlap tested Goethe's Law (1810) about how pleasingness may be related to the proportional size of areas occupied by different colors in paintings according to the lightness of those colors. …

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