Some people assume that there is a kind of beauty that everyone can agree on. But did early humans really admire slim bodies the way we do today? After all, fashions come and go – there have been enough fads throughout history that we struggle to understand today.
UK Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner recently suggested removing “beautiful” from the government’s housing policy, saying it was too subjective. She said in an interview that “beautiful doesn’t really mean anything, it means one thing to one person and another thing to another.”
She is not alone. Many people support the idea, first formulated by Irish novelist Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
But is this true? The current state of our knowledge about aesthetics, and specifically what we find beautiful, is a mosaic of empirical discoveries. For over 150 years, psychologists have been conducting carefully controlled experiments to determine whether a feature, such as a particular color, shape, or melody, is beautiful.
A number of rules have emerged, but none are universal: for example, the golden ratio in geometry, which indicates a rectangle with a height to width ratio of 1:1.6. While some find these dimensions beautiful in objects such as buildings or windows, they are an unusual choice for bathroom tiles or books.
Research has shown that our experiences of finding things visually appealing are an integral, and often unconscious, part of how we perceive objects in the world around us. It takes about 50 milliseconds, the blink of an eye, to reliably decide whether we like an object or not.
Familiarity is a big factor. When something is seen or heard often, it is easier for our nervous system (our sight and hearing) to process it. And this ease can be misattributed to beauty. This also explains how trends in beauty arise: if we continue to see and celebrate a certain type of face, it becomes familiar.
Beauty arises in different ways. Whether something is considered beautiful depends on the characteristics of the person looking at it, such as previous experiences, expertise and attitude. It can also depend on whether the object is hanging in a museum or in a hospital corridor. It can also depend on the characteristics of the object itself, such as its shape, colour, proportions or size.
Beauty can therefore come from good design. When people encounter an easy-to-use object or interface, they find it more pleasant than its difficult-to-use counterparts. Easy-to-use objects often have visual characteristics such as clear balance, brightness and good contrast.
Does beauty play a role in housing policy?
Discussions about beauty are healthy, until they also turn to housing policy.
A beautiful building can bring joy and contentment to everyday life. Beautiful, well-designed homes can significantly improve the mental health of their occupants. Attractive, well-built environments can reduce stress, increase feelings of happiness, and contribute to a sense of peace and contentment.
This may be why there is growing evidence that taking small doses of psychedelics in a controlled setting, such as a clinic, that induce intense experiences of beauty can help treat depression.
A beautiful building means that someone has gone the extra mile. This can be meaningful to the child growing up in social housing, and can provide a sense of pride and belonging. Aesthetic appeal in homes and neighborhoods can lead to civic pride, with residents taking collective responsibility for maintaining and improving their environment.
Pride can lead to stronger, more vibrant communities, an idea brought to life in modern times by the “city beautiful movement” in the U.S. (1890–1920). “Mean streets make mean people,” wrote the movement’s leading theorist, Charles Mulford Robinson.
Beauty in homes is not just about aesthetics; it often coincides with functionality. Good design considers the usability and comfort of spaces, ensuring that they are both beautiful and practical. This balance can improve the quality of life for residents by making spaces more efficient and enjoyable to live in.
Beauty can also encourage persistence. When searching for information on a website, persistence—the amount of time users continue searching for hard-to-find information—increases when the website is independently judged to be aesthetically pleasing.
The same goes for electronic devices. People take longer to make them work if they like them.
People are also willing to work harder to continue seeing a face they find beautiful, even if it doesn’t come with any other reward.
Beauty also requires copies of itself. Historically in art and design, landscapes, views or vases that were considered beautiful have been copied in various forms. The act of drawing, sculpting, writing about, composing about a beautiful object is to make a copy of it.
Don’t invest less in beauty
The subjectivity of beauty does not require us to stop investing in it. Beauty does mean something, even if it is not entirely objective. Trying to bring beauty into our daily lives, regardless of whether we all have a unique perspective, as in the case of housing, would mean investing in the human experience for everyone.
So while beauty is subjective to some extent, artistic design can play a crucial role in many aspects of our lives, from psychological well-being to social cohesion and even economic value. Industry giants like Ikea and Apple have been reaping the benefits of applying this knowledge to their business models for decades.
Why build beautiful homes in the first place? With the human experience in mind when building homes and neighborhoods, and with the immense impact that something well designed and constructed can have in mind, it is a valuable investment in humanity.
If removing the word beautiful from housing policy helps to build more homes, that’s great. But when it comes to actually building them – whether the word “beautiful” is in the policy or not – it’s definitely worth considering investing in beauty.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The authors are not employees of, consultants to, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.