IAEA 2026 · World Aesthetic Survey (WAS): Aesthetic preferences for shape, curvature, colour, and music across 62 societies

Harin Lee, Eline Van Geert, Elif Çelen, Zofia Hołubowska, Manuel Anglada-Tort, Raja Marjieh, Pol van Rijn, Minsu Park, & Nori Jacoby
Biennial Congress of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics 2026 · Jena, Germany

Understanding the origins of aesthetic preference requires determining whether preferences reflect universal cognitive mechanisms or culturally learned patterns. We conducted a global experiment with 31,288 participants across 61 countries and one small-scale society (Tsimané people living in Bolivian rainforest), examining aesthetic preferences across five modalities: shapes, curvature, colour combinations, musical harmony, and melody. Prior research has typically used fixed stimulus sets, restricting sampling to narrow regions of feature space and introducing researcher bias. To overcome this limitation, we employed continuous sampling: on each trial, stimuli were stochastically generated in real time across the full parametric range of each modality. Aggregating preference ratings across participants revealed the topological structure of aesthetic taste within each culture. These topological maps then could be used to identify preference peaks shared across cultures (suggesting universal mechanisms) and culture-specific peaks (suggesting learned patterns). Cross-cultural variation in aesthetic preferences was systematic. Education level, socio-cultural values, and economic factors emerged as the strongest predictors of variation. Musical preferences showed the strongest adherence to mathematical ratio relations, while colour preferences exhibited more categorical tendencies. Classical ‘universal’ findings (e.g. preferences for symmetry and consonant music harmonies) replicated robustly in most industrialised populations but were substantially weaker or absent among the Tsimané, demonstrating how cultural histories and exposure profiles can modulate or even eliminate putatively universal biases. These findings and data (to be made open access) provide a framework for empirical aesthetics research to systematically distinguish which aesthetic features reflect shared human preferences and which emerge through cultural learning.