Explaining Beauty: The Hidden Functions Behind Aesthetics

Why do people from some cultures find body modifications attractive that others find ugly? What makes a Picasso beautiful? Why are fashion trends constantly changing? This course delves into the hidden functions that explain our aesthetic tastes, including what we find beautiful in the physical body, art, and fashion.

Drawing on classic evolutionary theory, theories of cultural evolution, and game theory, we seek to explain both aesthetic tastes that remain relatively constant and those that differ dramatically across time and culture.

We begin the course by building a toolkit for generating hypotheses about the hidden function behind what we find beautiful and then apply these tools to a series of diverse case studies.