Introduction to This Special Section on Beauty, Goodness, and Usability

I recently made a big mistake: I tried to explain my theory of beauty to an art historian. “There are several levels of beauty,” I started to explain. “Surface beauty, which I call visceral; beauty in operation or behavioral; and beauty in depth, in meaning, and implication, which I call reflective. Visceral or surface beauty is biologically determined. Everyone,” I said, “is pretty much the same across the world, regardless of culture. That’s why we like sweet tastes and dislike bitter ones, like bright colors and ...” That’s as far as I ever got. “Utter nonsense,” said the art historian. “Not everyone likes bright colors. And I happen to like bitter tastes.” “Yes, yes,” I tried to interject, “but at the visceral level we are all the same— it’s at the reflective level that the cultural differences emerge. Your visceral level still responds negatively to bitter substances, but that’s subconscious. Consciousness is only at the reflective level, which overrides the lower level signals.” That argument made things worse, not better. We could not communicate. Psychological data and literature citations were irrelevant; he knew that all people were different. The notion that higher levels of processing could override lower ones, far from being the nice answer to his doubts, only antagoHUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION, 2004, Volume 19, pp. 311–318 Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.