Ego-Development and the Aesthetics of Structures

In stage models of personality development, advancing development is understood as an increased interaction with the surrounding world. In the aesthetics of structures that can be found in the surrounding world, for example, in architecture or landscape design, it is this interaction between humans and the environment that is crucial. In order to investigate the connection between personality development and the aesthetics of abstract structures, especially their characteristics in terms of size and order, and how they change over the course of development, the present study combined Loevinger’s Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT) with a task of laying aesthetically pleasing structures that were composed of individual building blocks. The results show that further development is linked to an increased preference for larger, ordered structures, and therefore suggest that development as a process of change in the relationship to the environment is also reflected in aesthetic production and appreciation.