Seeing beauty even when none may exist

Belief, serving as a foundational source of insights for navigating the world, plays a crucial role in shaping cognitive processes such as perception, attention and memory. Considering aesthetics, typically framed as subjective experience, we explore the question: can belief influence or even reshape this experience? In a series of experiments, we designed a specific task demonstrating the role belief plays in aesthetics. In a competition task, two subjects respond as fast as possible to artworks after presented for 3s, followed by feedback on winning or losing. Subsequently, a recognition task and a rating task were carried out. During the recognition task, participants were presented with artworks from the competition and novel pieces. They were prompted to indicate whether they had seen this artwork in the competition and specify whether they won or lost. In the rating task, they provided aesthetic ratings for both the competition and novel artworks. All the artworks were selected from The Vienna Art Picture System and the initial aesthetic ratings between conditions were counterbalanced. The results unveil intriguing patterns. In Exp.1, participants completed the recognition task followed by the rating task, revealing higher aesthetic ratings for novel artworks compared to those actually shown. Surprisingly, artworks recognized (or reported) as previously displayed received significantly higher aesthetic ratings than those recognized as not shown (even when they might not displayed), indicating that the belief of having seen the artwork impacts aesthetic evaluations. Exp.2 altered the task order to avoid the influence of the recognition task on ratings, yet the same effect persisted. In Exp.3, we introduced a more realistic competitive environment and found consistent results. In Exp.4, participants from Exp.3 underwent the same recognition and rating tasks a month later, and the effect endured. Collectively, these findings suggest that the belief possesses the capacity to alter aesthetic ratings.