Conservatism and art preferences.

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Starting with the proposition that a generalized fear of uncertainty is the psychological variable which accounts for the organization of social attitudes along a general factor of liberalism-co nservatism, it was hypothesized that conservatives would express an aversion to highly complex and abstract art works. Twenty paintings were chosen by an art expert, five to represent each of four categories differing in degree of uncertainty: simple representational, simple abstract, complex representational, and complex As predicted, high scorers on the Conservatism Scale preferred paintings in the simple representational category and showed a definite dislike of the complex repre- sentational and complex abstract works, while liberals preferred the more complex and abstract paintings. It was further demonstrated that the com- plexity dimension was the primary discriminator of the judgments of liberals and conservatives (r — —.S6, p < .01) rather than abstraction (r=— .14, ns). Studies in several cultures have confirmed the importance of a general factor, best de- scribed as conservatism, underlying the entire field of social attitudes (Bagley, Wilson, & Boshier, 1970; Schneider & Minkmar, 1972; Wilson, 1970). The "ideal" conservative is

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: