Identifying Aesthetic Judgments when Participants Anticipate an Experimenter's Evaluation

A participant can judge an artwork unfavorably and nevertheless report a favorable response after considering how an experimenter will interpret it. The same cue can also change attention, task meaning or judgment itself. This paper examines what aesthetic-response data identify under those possibilities. Experience, judgment, response decision, execution and recording are distinguished without assuming a universal sequence of independent mental stages. A categorical response channel yields conditional population identification under independent calibration and full column rank. Null-space countermodels expose failure, while a singular-value bound separates uniqueness from stability. A binary specialization derives sharp judgment-prevalence bounds under uncertain sensitivity and false-positive rates, including sampling uncertainty and cue-specific compatibility. Randomized cues identify total effects on recorded responses under ordinary design assumptions; a constructed pair of observationally equivalent models allocates the same effect differently between judgment and reporting. A three-indicator special case derives a possible noncircular calibration route under fixed judgment, conditional independence and homogeneous rates. A bounded nested-interpretation model separates the participant's beliefs about experimenter preferences, study objectives and evaluation of the participant. A prospective aesthetic-study design addresses refusal, category semantics, calibration transport, elicitation effects and alternative explanations. Orne's demand-characteristics account, an established demand-bounding method and semantic-context research supply explicit antecedents. The contribution is a limited identification framework and research design, with individual experience and psychological mechanism requiring further evidence.