A research paper co-authored by Carey Business School Assistant Professor Haiyang Yang, titled “Instantaneously Hotter: The Dynamic Revision of Beauty Assessment Standards,” was awarded the Franco Nicosia Best Competitive Paper Award by the Association for Consumer Research, the leading academic organization for behavioral research in marketing.
Yang’s paper, written with Leonard Lee of the National University of Singapore, was selected from 545 competitive paper submissions to the 2014 conference of the Association for Consumer Research.
The paper shows that beauty is an instantaneously and dynamically constructed notion. In a large-scale field study and lab experiments, the researchers found that study participants automatically modified their beauty assessment standards when they were exposed to others’ aesthetic views (even though those views differed significantly from their own). Participants’ subsequent judgments of beauty converged toward the average taste, although previously they did not know others’ evaluations of those targets and their judgments were anonymous and free from social pressure.
Without prior exposures to others’ aesthetic views, however, participants did not converge towards the average taste. These findings thus demonstrate a micro-level mechanism of how shifts in aesthetic views occur at the macro, societal level.