created 2025-03-14, & modified, =this.modified
NOTE
I don’t think I am conscious of playing music as being attractive. Most of the songs I play are hidden, deliberately non-attractive. Whatever I create, also. Without social media use, where would people even find it? And even on there, it doesn’t seem to be cared for.
I just saw this in a related study while reading about Computational Aesthetics
Evolution theorists have postulated adaptive functions for music
- strengthening in-group cohesion
- intimidating enemies
- promoting child bonding.
We focus on a longstanding Darwinian hypothesis, suggesting that music production evolved as a vehicle to display an individual’s biological fitness in courtship competition, thus rendering musicality a sexually selected trait. We also extend this idea to visual artists.
Participants rated each portrayed person’s appeal on multiple scales, including attractiveness, interestingness, sympathy, and trustworthiness.
The results demonstrate divergent findings for both types of data, with only the explicit statements corroborating Darwin’s hypothesis. We discuss this divergence in detail, along with the particular role of interestingness revealed by the implicit data.
Why do humans engage with the arts
Archeological findings date back to more than forty thousand years when it comes to musical instruments and paintings. These artifacts show a stunning level of refinement and mastery, implying that the origins of music production and visual art must go back even way further into our past.
The first object our ancestors began to aesthetically modify were their own bodies, as suggested by archeological records of personal ornaments and ochre, a form of body paint, dating back at least 100,000 years.
These practices are believed to have primarily served the purposes of attracting sexual partners and demonstrating social status, aligning with our modern behaviors such as wearing make-up, jewelry, brands, and insignia.
Darwin’s own words: “musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex”
For humans, Darwin’s hypothesis is standing to reason given the emotional power and impact music can exert on listeners along with the visually displayed mechanical skills involved in playing an instrument.
NOTE
Time to delete any instance of me playing guitar from the internet.
I recall the scene from Compartment No 6, great film and that thieving guitar tool.
Holding a guitar in a photo:
Despite its popularity and face validity, only a few studies have empirically substantiated Darwin’s idea. One online study demonstrated that friendship invitations from a Facebook profile featuring a man holding a guitar received more positive feedback from females (and higher acceptance rates) compared to the same profile without the guitar in the picture
Another study:
The results did not comply with Darwin’s hypothesis; profiles containing verbal cues about music production did not increase their attractiveness. Instead, the results were more in line with the similarity-attracts hypothesis, where musicians preferred musicians and non-musicians preferred non-musicians.
“Auditory Cheesecake”:
Yet other theorists, most notably Steven Pinker, argue that musicality is a useless by-product of the evolution of the human central nervous system.
Darwin did not propose sexual dimorphism in musicality, where males would be superior compared to females:
Darwin even assumed the opposite: “Women are generally thought to possess sweeter voices than men, and as far as this serves as any guide, we may infer that they first acquired musical powers in order to attract the other sex.”
In addition to attractiveness, we also collected ratings for sympathy, interestingness, and trustworthiness, as well as the participants’ motivation to meet the depicted person.
Results
When participants were asked at the end of the study to explicitly compare artistic and non-artistic individuals, they favored the artists on almost all scales, except for Trustworthiness and Reason. Particularly notable was their positive judgment regarding Interestingness.
Environmental cues that identified a person as a musician boosted their perceived attractiveness to a lesser degree than cues identifying a person as a teacher, waiter, farmer, artisan, or most other non-artistic control conditions in our study.
Musicians had a lower boost in Sympathy, Trustworthiness, Wish-to-Meet and self-paced stimulus exploration time
There is a discrepancy between implicit outcomes and the conscious judgments:
Interestingly, when explicitly asked whether artists were more appealing (attractive, interesting, likeable, exciting, etc.) than non-artists, participants decided in favor of the artists on almost all scales (Fig. 3). Additionally, in absolute numbers, musicians and painters emerged as the most preferred professions, with average scores exceeding 70 on a 0 to 100 scale, while military personnel, police officers, and office employees ranked lowest in this regard, with scores falling below 30 points
It may reveal a general disparity in people’s explicitly stated attitudes towards artists compared to their unconscious dispositions. In other words, only the explicit (and publicly expressed) view of artists is highly appreciative
Explicit reports can thus be subject to distortions by social desirability. On an implicit, unconscious level, however, our data suggest that musicians and visual artists are perceived as less attractive, less likeable, and also less reliable than non-artists.
Interestingness is high, so it could be the cause for approach:
Artists were judged to be by far more interesting than non-artists. Interestingness could thus serve as a potential factor that prompts people to approach an artist in the first place. Subsequent (real-life) interactions could then lead to romantic attraction, provided that additional conditions are met.