Templeton Religion Trust
Do experiences with art make people think in a more elevated and abstract way?
How do emotions correlate to this elevated thinking?
How do emotions relate to prosocial behavior?
An electrical repair for the house, a doctor’s appointment that needs setting, a dish for a school potluck, a procrastinated task at work, feeding the dog, flossing after every meal… These are the immediate personal tasks characteristic of a full, busy life–and that’s just today. Addressing the demands of the day doesn’t seem to allow a lot of space for the needs of others, much less, the concerns of future generations.
But maybe on any ordinary weekday, a song you haven’t thought about for a while plays from someone’s radio outside your window. A feeling of transcendence lifts you out of your train of thought and there’s a new sense of “space” in the day.
Experimental psychologist Simone Schnall is asking questions about what type of chain reaction might be possible when we have “aesthetic experiences.” Can people be moved by art, beyond their current personal concerns, to the needs of others (and Schnall hopes, even future generations)? Can they be enabled through art to connect with higher values, and even to put these values into action?
“I’m interested in why people do the things they do, and especially when they do good things, positive things, selfless things for other people,” Schnall says. “And related to that, how do they decide what’s good? What’s right versus what’s wrong?”
This research project from Schnall, “Higher Values: Aesthetic Experiences, Transcendence, and Prosociality” (University of Cambridge), leads with the question of whether artworks lead to a “transcendent mindset,” which Schnall’s research team characterizes as a state with an increased tendency to think abstractly. This elevated, abstract mindset is one in which people tend to endorse values such as benevolence, deeper understanding, and questions of meaning in life. Schnall’s research has uncovered evidence that aesthetic experiences lead to this abstract mindset, but she points out this new research can take it further, saying, “There might be profound influences of being exposed to art, perceiving it consciously, but perhaps also taking it in on a more unconscious level.” This research project will uncover new details about this correlation.
Relatedly, Schnall and her team are exploring whether the transcendent mindset elicited by artistic experiences increases value-based behavior, leading people to live in a more moral, prosocial way. This involves investigating the concept of moral elevation, which occurs when people observe someone being selfless and good, inspiring them to engage in helping behavior themselves. Dr. Schnall and her team were the first to demonstrate this in a previous study. The current project seeks to see if something similar happens with aesthetic experiences; can they also inspire the desire to do good for others? To this end, they have set up various ways for study participants to help or donate after the study is “done”—but not really done—as a way of measuring helping behavior inspired by aesthetic experiences.
As if the dynamics of art, cognition, and behavior weren’t complex enough, Schnall knows there’s another factor that must be examined to get a complete picture. What is the role of affect—mood, mindset, emotions—as the context for an art encounter? Schnall explains it this way:
“When somebody stands at the base of a steep hill with a friend, they judge that hill to be less steep than when they’re by themselves. This indicates that even when it comes to the physical environment, people are influenced by their psychological states. If that’s the case for the physical environment, we have all the more reason to believe that something much more subjective, like the beauty of a piece of art, is driven by people’s psychological states.”
These questions are researched with rigorous empirical methods from psychology, conducting many studies over the project timeframe, with diverse groups of participants, taking place online, in laboratory settings, and in art galleries and museums. An example of such an experiment is, showing people images of lush, beautiful landscapes and measuring the type of cognitive processing that follows. They are then asked to complete self-report scales measuring their values and abstract thinking. A control group views very plain landscapes. In another experiment, participants are given opportunities to engage in prosocial behaviors, such as helping tasks, after engaging with artworks.
The previous versions of this current study took place only in a laboratory setting. The data collection is now expanding to include studies that take place in museums. Eye-tracking technology will also be used, along with surveys that ask participants about abstract thinking and the transcendent mindset. By broadening the scope of the research to include real-world settings and advanced measurement techniques, Schnall’s team aims to capture a more comprehensive picture of how aesthetic experiences influence cognitive and moral outcomes.
Why go to such lengths to understand these complex, dynamic correlations between art and human behavior? Aesthetic experiences happen all the time, not just in museums, so it’s difficult to delineate which experiences are meaningful and how to measure them. Identifying hard metrics for these benefits is elusive, but if it can be done, as the burgeoning field of aesthetic cognitivism is trying to do, there are many implications for human good. Arts “strategies” could be developed more intentionally, serving to elevate people’s thinking and encourage behaviors that benefit future generations.
The larger context for this work is the questions about the function of the arts in society, and how much they should be valued. Arts and culture budgets are often the first to be cut by government bodies when the budget gets tight. There is a need to empirically demonstrate the benefits of the arts. Many overlapping global crises show there is an urgent need to help people think beyond their own self-benefit.
For this reason, Schnall brings a sense of urgency to this work, that we might engage people in every possible way—including through art—toward this altruistic goal. If aesthetic experience encourages selflessness and long-term thinking, it could mobilize people to take collective action for the greater good. This includes communities, governments, and policymakers who need empirical evidence to justify arts funding.
