Being around beauty causes all sorts of emotions: most often happiness or joy, but a euphoric feeling or even sadness and greediness are also common. But how do these beauty connected feelings guide our actions? What are their behavioral consequences? What does it mean to be motivated by beauty?

Motivation is an emotion that sits on the threshold between thinking about doing something and actually doing it. A human fascination for this correlation between motivation and action goes back a long way. Leonardo da Vinci is said to have claimed: “Every action needs to be prompted by a motive.”

So how do our actions come about? Do we actually choose what we do? Or do we just stumble around blindly? Are most of our actions a result of conscious decisions? Or are we driven by motives beyond our scope? Where does beauty come in? What is the interconnection between motivation and beauty?

One of the current scholars on this concept, Lambert Deckers, defines motivation as “to be moved into action.” He states: “motivations refers to the why of behavior, (.. and not the how)” (Deckers, 2018, pp. 19). ^[1] Building on this ‘why’, when he mentions the role of beauty, he refers to evolutionary psychology. Looking at beauty through this lens actually means that our sensitivity to it is a psychological mechanism, stemming from natural selection or sexual selection in human evolution. The approach goes back to Darwin’s proposition which states that ultimately we are all wired according to principles that are linked to the procreation of the human species.

In classical Darwinian theory, only a certain kind of beauty plays a role: the type that refers to outward appearance. Here, the sole importance of beauty has to do with the fact that characteristics of what we regard as a beautiful human being can be traced back to certain aspects of healthiness which are important for the securing of offspring. It is this principle that lies at the heart of the title of the seminal publication on this topic by the American Harvard psychologist Nancy Etcoff: Survival of the Prettiest. Hers is the quote “In the United States more money is spent on beauty than on education or social services.”.

“In the United States more money is spent on beauty than on education or social services.“

So although it is obvious that the physical aspect of beauty is strongly linked to the existence of an entire industry, one could ask if the buck stops at this purely evolutionary view of beauty’s role in human motivation. Does it do justice to the complexity and significance of beauty as a driving force behind our behavior?

Personally I don’t think so. The role of beauty as a motivational driver in other areas of life than  breeding, is conspicuously absent in the psychology of motivation. Surprising, in fact, since  we also go into nature to find beauty, buy beautiful art because it inspires us, love beautiful interiors that make us feel great, attend Mass to find spiritual beauty etc. etc. Maybe with some explanatory effort procreation might also be linked to all these sorts of human actions, but we would seriously have to stretch Darwin’s’ view about passing on our fittest genes. Beauty’s motivational role is about much more than just physical attraction.

Why is it important to gain a broader view on beauty and motivational psychology? Well, this knowledge may help us better understand to what extent beauty moves and drives us, and thus give us more control over our lives. Nowadays many professions apply knowledge from theories about human motivation o  design situations aimed at influencing our behavior. For specialists in fields like health behavior, traffic behavior, or buying behavior, human motivational theories are a must. They often also apply tools related to beauty. Catering to our longing to be seduced by some dreamy image or story makes us actually want to jump through the commercial, or whatever sort of hoop they hold in front of us.

“Know thyself.“

Thus, if we aspire to have as much control over our own lives as possible, some curiosity about theories of human behavior and motivation – and beauty’s role –  might be helpful. How much of our beauty seeking buying, leisure, travel or even mating behavior is actually contributing to our personal well-being? And maybe wider even: is beauty as a behavioral guide contributing to a thriving planet? Or do we sometimes damage our planet by our search for beauty?

Many answers will circle back to the ‘why’ of our behavior. But not just to from an evolutionary perspective: beauty as a driving force can also be explored in social psychology, aesthetic psychology, environmental psychology and the psychology of religion. All these knowledge domains can provide us with deeper insights into various aspects of beauty.

“Know thyself” is an old Greek exhortation  inscripted in the temple of Apollo in Delphi. This adage compels us to look in the mirror and acquire as much self-knowledge as possible. Some self-awareness about how our actions are driven by the search for beauty (of whatever sort) surely would please the Greek author of the inscription.

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Additional information

• A short video about how it all started: A Beautiful Journey
  
  
• More info about Project Beauty is available on the website.
  
  
• The questionnaire that is at the heart of the project can be found here. (US version)
  
  
• Stay updated on Project Beauty: follow us on Facebook.
  
  
• So far the core survey of Project Beauty has been used for national representative surveys in five European countries, the USA and Peru. Project Beauty now covers data about perceptions of beauty of over half a billion people worldwide.
  
  
• Recently we also started offering an in-company version of this inspiring project. In case you are interested to learn more about applying Project Beauty within your organisation: please contact us.
  
  
• Project Beauty was made possible by the generous support of various research agencies: Dynata, @Blauw Research, @PanelBase @Datum Internacional) and numerous wonderful individuals.
  
  
• To support Project Beauty you can purchase your country version (e-)book from the Seeking Beauty series.
  
  
• Please contact us in case you are interested in a branded version of these books as a special value-based corporate gift.

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Occasionally I do share new developments and findings about Project Beauty on social media like LinkedIn and Facebook, so when Twitter started many years ago I also created an account and tried it out. But soon I made a choice: this was a bridge too far. Given how much I appreciate my offline time, this new channel with which to share a slice of my life was just too much. Even the recent option to look directly into the mind of a US president wasn’t temping enough – no Twitter for me.

But then, about a week ago, a friend forwarded me a tweet from Elon Musk, adding: “Quick, pick up on this!!” And after seven years I actually tweeted again. Elon’s tweet (see above) reads: “define … beauty”. It looked like Mr. Musk was ‘asking’ for a universally valid description of this wonderful but often also rather complicated concept ‘beauty’.

“Define … beauty”

There are a number of phrases that describe what it means to define something; one of them (Cambridge Dictionary) states, “to explain and describe the meaning and exact limits of something.” An effort to define something is often aimed at preventing confusion. By drafting some sort of fixed ‘authorized’ description that holds true for as many persons as possible, we then accept it as a truth. It seems Elon was looking for the truth about beauty.

Truth is one of three core concepts coined by the ancient Greek philosophers and known as ‘the Transcendentals’. The other ones are Justice and Beauty. It is almost like, by distinguishing this trio of phenomena, the classical scholars tried to describe three deeply complex and at the same time fundamentally different experiences. Like three dimensions of looking at the world.

Asking for the truth about beauty is a bit like looking at one dimension through the eyes of another. To compare it to our three-dimensional world, it’s like asking: ‘What is the depth of the height?’ It just doesn’t make sense. The terms belong to different universes.

The urge to find a common denominator in different dimensions is of course very human: our brains are structured to comprehend things, trying as much as we can to create unity out of diversity. However, a brain is just a brain, and not a heart, so its function is limited. Brains are needed for truths, not for beauty: they can understand emotions, but not experience them. And here Elon’s error kicks in. He was trying to look at beauty through the eyes of his brain. Definitely an interesting exercise, but not an easy one.       

“Lies can be beautiful.” 

So, in essence, different dimensions are not comparable because they are deeply different. But can they collide? Well, yes: in a three-dimensional model all axes may have the value of zero: they meet at the ultimate starting point. The same thing could be argued for the transcendental dimensions of Truth, Justice and Beauty. John Keats had a moment like this in mind when he wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty.” When someone actually used this quote to reply to Elon’s original tweet, Elon commented with, “Lies can be beautiful.’ It would of course be interesting to learn what lie he had in mind, but his comment mainly proves a unison of Beauty and Truth is not so usual. 

A meeting of all three Transcendentals, Truth, Beauty and Justice, in the same moment is probably even more unique. Maybe this instance cannot be described with words sufficiently, but only with a sound. Maybe the ‘Om’ chant in yoga? The sound seems to have a magnetic power …

Finally, and this intrigued me, notice how Elon wrote his tweet: ‘define … beauty’. Why the dots … ? Hesitance? Doubt? Irritancy? Contemplation? Was he trying to make a point? If you linger for a moment on these three small mysterious black marks, you may see something more. Perhaps Beauty?

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Additional information

• A short video about how it all started: A Beautiful Journey
• More info about Project Beauty is available on the website.
• The questionnaire that is at the heart of the project can be found here. (US version)
• Stay updated on Project Beauty: follow us on Facebook.
• So far the core survey of Project Beauty has been used for national representative surveys in five European countries, the USA and Peru. Project Beauty now covers data about perceptions of beauty of over half a billion people worldwide.
• Recently we also started offering an in-company version of this inspiring project. In case you are interested to learn more about applying Project Beauty within your organisation: please contact us.
• Project Beauty was made possible by the generous support of various research agencies: @Dynata, @Blauw Research, @PanelBase @Datum Internacional) and numerous wonderful individuals.
• To support Project Beauty you can purchase your country version (e-)book from the Seeking Beauty series.
• Please contact us in case you are interested in a branded version of these books as a special value-based corporate gift.

On how the heart got squeezed

Over the last few decades, the worldwide level of education has slowly increased. Although in some countries the process is very slow, in most countries more kids are going to schools, and in already well developed countries (in terms of education) the percentage of students that reach the level of tertiary or even higher education is exploding. The UNESCO even described this explosion in access to education as ‘massification’[1]. More than in any period of the existence of humanity, there is now a focus on the development and use of the brain.

While this trend is totally in line with modern civil views that it is better to fight with words than with weapons, a serious societal crack is now appearing. It’s called ‘polarization’.

In a world where, for decades, verbal capacities have been put on a pedestal, and where debating skills are a conditio sine qua non for rising to power, we have forgotten a basic evolutionary weaving error. This truth – which is kindergarten knowledge for any advertising or PR professional – reads: Emotions eat arguments for breakfast.

For as long as we have known, in a democratic society politics (and public government) has been the domain of reasonable people who displayed (but never solved) their disagreements by standing up and producing words. As populations grew in size, societies grew more complex, and the words politicians used more and more became highly specialized jargon. What has never changed is that not once in political history have all these wonderful words been so convincing as to actually move a member of one political party to another – a curious phenomenon. Political debating has become a rather boring cultural ritual needed to pass the years between elections. (This way of talking with closed minds is eloquently characterized by Otto Scharmer within his framework of Theory U as ‘downloading’.)

The experience of politics as, in some ways, verbal theater slowly became clear to those who were not so into words: the ones who were not able to make it to highly esteemed higher educational institutions and thus denied verbal eloquence as a means to power. Their response was obviously not verbal, but emotional: first the feeling of being overlooked and unimportant, then finally irritation, even turning into angriness. Hence: the breeding ground of polarization.

One simplified, but still interesting, view on human energy sources talks of the triad of the head, the heart and the gut. Where higher levels of education stress the development of the head (brains), the allergy to this verbal trend has been moving people down the spine rather than up, making them focus primarily on their gut feelings or even lower. Consequently, it has seemed that a growing part of society is functioning on two entirely different operating systems: brains versus balls. This has created the perfect social conditions for the expansions of two diagonal positioned cultural bubbles. Because, as an old saying goes:

‘A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still.’

As often happens when two extremes collide, the one in the middle – the heart, here representing the power to balance – gets squeezed. Where arguments and instincts battle for control, the soft power of acting according to values easily becomes inaudible. To come back to a more stable world, the challenge therefore has to be to strengthen each and everyone’s capacity to slow down and listen more carefully to each other while focusing on essential questions, such as what makes life worth living? Because as it appears, when focusing on the beauty of life, as human beings we find our common ground again. Like Sting tried to tell us when he sang:

‘the Russians love their children too’.

There are already many international days of such and such, but maybe it is time for a ‘World Beauty Day’. Because one thing is certain: if we don’t develop a stronger ability to share what deeply moves us, we will never again understand what can unite us.

[1] Trends in global higher education: tracking an academic revolution; executive summary. See also: Thinking About ‘Massification of Higher Education Revisited’.

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This text is written as part of my membership of COMMON and part of the release of the first American version of Project Beauty and the release of the book ‘Seeking Beauty | USA’.

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Additional information

• More info about Project Beauty is available on the website of the project.
• The questionnaire that is at the heart of the project can be found here.
• Stay updated on Project Beauty: follow us on Facebook.
• So far the core survey of Project Beauty has been used for national representative surveys in five European countries, the USA and Peru. Project Beauty now covers data about perceptions of beauty of over half a billion people worldwide.
• Recently we also started offering an in-company version of this inspiring project. In case you are interested to learn more about applying Project Beauty within your organisation: please contact us.

Since a number of weeks an ‘organism at the edge of life’ is spreading: COVID-19. To minimize contamination we are advised to practice ‘social distancing’ which means as much as: avoid working at the office, don’t go to conferences or meetings but try to work from home as much as possible. On top of this professional earthquake also our regular social life has to change: don’t go to concerts or exhibitions, stay out of the gym and especially avoid restaurants or pubs. Basically it comes down to this: the only safe place to do all the things we need and want to do is at home.

Although the effects of this confinement are massive on the economical, societal and environmental level, they also have a severe impact on two personal aspects: our body and our mind. For our body it for sure will mean a tremendous decrease of physical movements. The amount of square meters where we can walk, work and play is suddenly reduced from 149 million km2 to several tens (or if you’re lucky hundreds) of square meters. The second aspect (and for a big part as a result of the first, because body and mind are closely linked): the variety of our daily mental experiences will most likely suffer a total implosion.

Staying indoors for a long time is not a favorite leisure activity for many of us, especially not in this space that we already know so well and where we on purpose really try to get away from so often: home. Going outside only to get some groceries or open a window to breath some fresh air is a way of living we more or less associate with prison life. And low and behold: suddenly we are all ‘prisoners’ in some way. And for this foreseeable future called quarantine we have to deal with the question: how are we going to spend our time in these hopefully comfortable but still limited number of rooms we call home?

Some of us are in vital professions and still need to leave the house to go to work, some of us do work that now has to be done from home. But still an enormous number people are suddenly confronted with an amount of spare time that we normally associate with weekends or holiday periods. Only: we can’t go out to do these lovely relaxing and beautiful leisure things that we are intrinsically motivated to do, like traveling, sports, going to exhibitions, movies or theaters, or even shopping. Many of our favorite spare time activities are suddenly off-limits, which means all of a sudden we are psychologically in uncharted territories. Because where will our mind wander when our bodies are confined to a limited number of square meters at home.

“When one door closes, another opens.”

The saying is attributed to one of the founders of modern telephony Alexander Graham Bell: “When one door closes, another opens.” What is often left out is the second part of his insight: “… but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”

A quarantine period also closes many (behavioral) doors, but we apparently are not automatically inclined to focus on the ones that are opened up by this drastic reduction of freedom of movement. Well: the solution might be not easy, but certainly a cheap one: why not let our mind wander and go down paths it has not been for a while? Because, what other choice have we for new and exciting experiences, then to look at everything in and around our houses in a new way and try to see things that we maybe only noticed when they were new or young? These everyday things we used to love or hold beautiful, but stopped appreciating, because we have become too familiar with them. Why not try to use this awkward period to find this unnoted open door of ‘unfamiliarizing’, behind which we may discover a new world of experiences consisting of people and things we already know for a long time?

“There is more beauty in a rock than you can experience in a lifetime.”

The American art and education scholar Eliot Eisner once said “There is more beauty in a rock than you can experience in a lifetime.” So when there is nowhere to go for some time except from the living room to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to the toilet, and from the toilet to the bathroom and then back again: why not pick-up Eisner’s challenge? Why not just try to look at the plants on your windowsill for a while and discover how many shades of green they have? Take a book that you read a long time ago and find out if it still captivates you? Sit (or even go online and talk) with a roommate or friend and together pick-up an intriguing question that may lead to a deeper meeting than you had with them for a long time? Or look in the eyes of your loved one and think back of your first spark? Summarized: why not take a time-out to review and experiment with what personally for you really makes life worth living? Project Beauty’s set of questions might even be helpful.

And maybe it is even possible: turning this quarantine period with all these drastic physical constraints into something advantageous: a small step towards the expansion of our minds. Then (and of course only if your health or the health of a loved one has not been seriously affected!) for some of us it might give this at first sight doomsday scenario of the COVID-19 epidemic also the deeper layer of a blessing in disguise.

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Additional information

●  More info about Project Beauty is available on the website of the project.

● The questionnaire that is at the heart of the project can be found here. It is open for use by everyone.

● If you want to stay updated about the project: follow us on Facebook.

● So far the core survey of Project Beauty has been used for national representative surveys in five European countries. Recently we also started offering an in-company version of this inspiring project. In case you are interested to learn more about applying Project Beauty within your organisation: please contact us.

● Project Beauty was made possible by the generous support of various research agencies (Dynata Benelux, Blauw Research, PanelBase) and numerous wonderful individuals.

● To support Project Beauty you can purchase your country version (e-)book from the Seeking Beauty series.

● Please contact us in case you are interested in a branded version of these books as a special value-based corporate gift.