Universal, Cultural, or Individual? An Intercultural Assessment of Shared Proportions of Private Taste in Aesthetic Appreciation

Culture constitutes a core condition for human experiences, and it was often assumed that higher collectivism/lower individualism are typical for Asian as compared to European cultures. Evidence, however, was ambiguous. In the present study ( N = 79), we studied whether collectivism in preferences is seen in terms of a relatively higher level of shared tastes. We employed beholder indices/taste typicality to compute private taste from aesthetic evaluations for different classes of visual images of Japanese and European participants. Collectivism for each participant was measured through a standard scale based on participants’ opinions towards their peer group. No difference in collectivism measure between the two populations was found. However, congruence in personal taste meaningfully differed between cultures, showing higher shared taste in Japanese participants for artistic stimuli. These effects reached beyond comparisons by individual collectivistic tendencies. While these findings require replication with larger samples, they point towards meaningful differences in group norm adherence between cultures.