What Would the World Look Like Without Beauty?

One thing I realized early in studying the science of beauty is that the topic refuses to stay small for long.

You walk in thinking it's about pretty faces and nice paintings. But the moment you start paying attention, beauty spills into everything else: which poster to buy, how to organize your browser tabs, what chair feels right to sit on, what food to order because the photo just looks better.

Then the question gets bigger: "What's the biggest decision you've ever made based on aesthetics?" And suddenly people are talking about tattoos, weddings, who they married, even gender identity and transition.

Beauty isn't a side feature of human life. It's woven into practically every decision we make, from the trivial to the life-defining.

We underestimate how much aesthetics drives us

Here's a quick exercise. Think about the last 24 hours. How many decisions did you make based on how something looked or felt rather than pure function?

The outfit you picked. The app you opened first. The coffee mug you reached for. Whether you chose to sit inside or outside. The way you arranged items on your desk.

Most of these decisions happen so fast you don't even register them as aesthetic choices. But they are. Your brain is constantly running a quiet check in the background: does this look right? Does this feel pleasant? Does this fit the kind of environment I want around me?

The range is enormous. And what's interesting is that we tend to treat the small ones as trivial and the big ones as deeply personal — but the same cognitive machinery is running underneath all of them.

The cheerleader effect: your brain averages faces automatically

One of the more fun findings in this space is the cheerleader effect — the idea that people look more attractive in a group than they do alone.

The name comes from the TV show How I Met Your Mother (Barney Stinson coined it), but the science behind it is real. Research by Drew Walker and Ed Vul at UCSD demonstrated that this isn't just a sitcom joke — it's a measurable perceptual phenomenon.

Here's why it works. Your visual system isn't built to inspect every face in a group one by one before forming an impression. Instead, it quickly extracts the gist of the group by building a summary representation — something like an averaged face distilled from all the faces it's seeing. This is called ensemble coding.

You don't see every leaf on a tree — you see the tree. You don't analyze every face in a crowd — you see a general impression. And because averaged faces are consistently rated as more attractive (we'll get to why in a moment), each individual face in the group gets a perceptual boost just from being near other faces.

This is also why a professor looking out at a lecture hall might not decode every individual expression and still immediately feel that the whole room is bored. The brain is very good at pulling an overall signal out of a cluster of similar cues — bored, engaged, restless — before it ever gets to the fine detail of each face.

Why averaged faces are attractive in the first place

This goes back to Francis Galton in the 1870s. Galton — Darwin's cousin, a brilliant statistician who also unfortunately promoted eugenics — wanted to identify the "criminal face." He overlaid photographs of convicted criminals onto a single plate, hoping the composite would reveal common features.

Instead, he discovered something unexpected: the composite face was more attractive than any individual face that went into it.

Modern research has confirmed this with computer-generated composites that avoid the soft-focus blur of Galton's method. The finding holds up:

• Averaged faces are more attractive than individual faces
• Even infants look longer at averaged faces — no cultural learning required
• The effect works for both male and female faces

But here's the nuance — averaged faces are attractive, but they're not the most attractive. Psychologist David Perrett showed that composites of the best-looking women are more attractive than composites of a random group. Supermodel-level faces have exaggerated features — larger eyes, thinner jaws, smaller mouth-to-chin distances — not averaged ones.

So averaging gets you far, but the peak is actually in slight exaggeration of already-attractive features. We'll come back to this when we talk about supernormal stimuli in a later post.

The world without beauty: a thought experiment

Here's where the conversation gets philosophical. Imagine waking up tomorrow and the entire human capacity for aesthetic appreciation is just... gone. No beauty preference. No ugliness either. Pure functional evaluation of everything.

What changes?

The positives are real

Without aesthetic judgment, a lot of bias disappears. Research consistently shows that attractive people receive lighter criminal sentences (Efran, 1974), are assumed to have better personalities (Dion, Berscheid & Walster, 1972), and are judged as more competent at their jobs (Palmer & Peterson, 2012). The halo effect — where one positive trait (attractiveness) colors perception of everything else — would have no entry point.

Marketing would lose its primary tool. The Corona ad isn't selling beer — it's selling the beautiful beach, the beautiful sunset, the beautiful model. Without aesthetic response, you'd evaluate the beer on taste alone. Entire industries built on aesthetic appeal — fashion, cosmetics ($460 billion globally), interior design — would either vanish or become unrecognizable.

People might make different social changes too. As one student in the discussion put it: small aesthetic changes — a haircut, a new outfit — can completely change how others treat you. That's a strange and somewhat unsettling feature of human social life. Without aesthetics, you'd be assessed on your actions and character rather than your appearance.

But the losses are devastating

Art. Music. Architecture beyond function. Film. Poetry. The impulse to preserve different languages and cultural traditions. The reason you pause to watch a sunset.

All of it depends on aesthetic capacity.

Buildings would look like... well, purely functional structures. Every water bottle would be the cheapest container that holds water. Nobody would care about the font on a sign. Writing on a whiteboard would be optimized for legibility, never for visual appeal.

And here's the deeper question: even in a world of pure function, would aesthetics sneak back in? There's an entire design movement — "form follows function" — that finds beauty in utilitarian simplicity. Minimalist architecture, clean code, efficient engineering. We attach aesthetic value to things precisely because they are functional and nothing more.

As Anjan Chatterjee writes in The Aesthetic Brain: "I appreciate the usefulness of the Philadelphia subway system but I do not find it beautiful like the Washington, DC metro system." Usefulness and beauty travel together sometimes, but they're not the same thing. Something can be perfectly useful and still ugly. Something can be impractical and still gorgeous.

Relationships in a post-aesthetic world

This is the part that generated the most discussion. If aesthetic preference disappears, what happens to romantic attraction?

One view: relationships become entirely personality-driven. You'd choose partners based on intelligence, kindness, humor, shared values — the things we already say matter most. The initial "hook" of physical attraction would simply not exist.

But is personality preference itself partly aesthetic? There's something about how a person carries themselves, their voice, their energy — is that aesthetic or is that something else? Where exactly does aesthetic judgment end and other forms of evaluation begin?

The honest answer is that we don't know where to draw the line. And that uncertainty is itself one of the most interesting things about studying beauty — it resists clean definitions.

Beauty requires thought — but not the kind you'd expect

One finding that reshaped how I think about this: beauty isn't just passive sensory pleasure. It requires active cognitive processing.

Brielmann and Pelli (2017) tested this by having people rate the pleasure and beauty of various stimuli — images, candy, a soft teddy bear — while simultaneously performing a demanding cognitive task (a "two-back" memory test). The idea was to see what happens when you reduce someone's available brainpower.

The result: the cognitive load greatly reduced both beauty and pleasure from stimuli that were otherwise experienced as beautiful. But it didn't affect the pleasure from simpler sensory experiences.

This confirms something Immanuel Kant argued centuries ago: beauty requires a kind of "harmonious free play of the imagination" — it's not just your eyes sending a pleasant signal. Your brain needs enough processing bandwidth to construct the aesthetic experience.

Simple pleasures — the taste of chocolate, the softness of a blanket — survive distraction. But the experience of beauty does not. It's computationally expensive. Your brain has to work to find something beautiful.

That reframing matters. It means beauty isn't a primitive reflex. It's a cognitive achievement.

So where does beauty actually live?

There are roughly two philosophical camps:

Objectivists say beauty is in the object. Certain proportions, symmetries, and arrangements are inherently beautiful regardless of who's looking.

Subjectivists say beauty is in the viewer. It's a projection of our internal states, preferences, and experiences onto the external world.

The scientific consensus leans toward a third option: interactionism. As Chatterjee puts it: "Beauty is not to be found exclusively in the world or in our heads. Our minds are part of the world, and how we think and experience and act has been molded by the world over eons of evolution. The experience of beauty comes from the interactions between our minds and the world."

This matters because it means studying beauty isn't just navel-gazing. If aesthetic experience arises from the interaction between evolved neural mechanisms and environmental features, then we can actually investigate it empirically. We can ask: which features of objects reliably trigger aesthetic responses? Which brain regions are involved? How do these responses vary across cultures, and where are they universal?

That's what neuroaesthetics is — the attempt to understand the "how" and "why" of beauty through the lens of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology.

Two foundational principles anchor this field:

1. All human behavior has a neural counterpart. Understanding brain properties shines light on any human faculty — including aesthetics.
2. Evolutionary forces have shaped our brain and behavior. The aesthetic preferences we have today were shaped by selection pressures that had nothing to do with art galleries.

A few things I'm taking away

• Aesthetic preference isn't a luxury add-on — it shapes decisions from the trivial (which mug, which font) to the life-defining (who to marry, how to present yourself to the world)
• The cheerleader effect is real: people look more attractive in groups because our visual system automatically averages faces, and averaged faces are rated as more attractive
• Francis Galton accidentally discovered facial averaging attractiveness while trying to find the "criminal face" — the composite turned out better-looking than any individual
• Averaged faces are attractive but not the most attractive — the peak is in faces with slightly exaggerated ideal features, not perfectly average ones
• A world without aesthetic sense would have less prejudice and consumerism, but also no art, music, architecture, or cultural preservation — the losses would be catastrophic
• Even in a purely functional world, humans might re-attach aesthetic value to simplicity and efficiency — we can't seem to escape aesthetic judgment
• Beauty requires thought — when cognitive capacity is reduced, beauty diminishes but simple sensory pleasure survives, confirming Kant's centuries-old intuition
• The science of beauty isn't objectivist or subjectivist but interactionist — beauty emerges from the meeting point of evolved brains and environmental features
• Neuroaesthetics is the attempt to study this empirically, grounded in two principles: all behavior has neural correlates, and evolution shaped our aesthetic capacity

And that last one — that evolution shaped our sense of beauty — is what makes this whole topic so much more interesting than "pretty things are nice." Our aesthetic responses aren't random or purely cultural. They're echoes of selection pressures that operated on our ancestors for millions of years.

Understanding that doesn't diminish beauty. It reveals just how deep it goes.

Sources:

• Walker, D., & Vul, E. (2014). Hierarchical encoding makes individuals in a group seem more attractive. Psychological Science, 25(1), 230-235.
• Galton, F. (1878). Composite portraits. Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 8, 132-144.
• Brielmann, A. A., & Pelli, D. G. (2017). Beauty requires thought. Current Biology, 27(10), 1506-1513.
• Chatterjee, A. (2014). The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art. Oxford University Press.
• Palmer, S. E., Schloss, K. B., & Sammartino, J. (2013). Visual aesthetics and human preference. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 77-107.
• Dion, K. K., Berscheid, E., & Walster, E. (1972). What is beautiful is good. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24(3), 285-290.
• Perrett, D. I., May, K. A., & Yoshikawa, S. (1994). Facial shape and judgements of female attractiveness. Nature, 368, 239-242.