ABSTRACT
The most pertinent example is provided by studies of esthetic judgment where, one might assume, “good” judgment is a defining criterion and all else is an error term. On the contrary, research on aesthetic judgment shows that personality in fact helps explain why judgments, good or less good, are made. The whole research group would then analyze the images and the recorded protocol, attempt to reconstruct the painter’s intentions, comment on the style and composition, and react to the image’s aesthetic quality. The important next step was to verify that the images indeed had the qualities we had attributed to them intuitively, and that the individual interpretations we had made and recorded had some validity. The images were timid, formal, and done in a disconnected, saccadic manner; their content and form were banal and failed to evoke an emotional response.
