{
  "id": 16947145,
  "title": "Why do we find certain things beautiful? A psychologist’s new book offers a bold answer",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/28/why-do-we-find-certain-things-beautiful-a-psychologists-new-book",
  "topic": "world",
  "section": "World",
  "published": "2026-10-28T19:11:56.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Conversation AU",
    "slug": "the-conversation-au",
    "url": "https://theconversation.com/why-do-we-find-certain-things-beautiful-a-psychologists-new-book-offers-a-bold-answer-294056"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "In 1994, Russian-American artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid embarked on a mission to create America's most beautiful painting through The People's Choice art project. By contracting a market research company to survey the American public about their views on beauty in art, they found that majority preferences reflected in the painting \"America's Most Wanted\" included cool blues, a natural setting, and an eminent historical figure. This artwork mirrored the preferences of the US population, with similar variations found in other countries like Kenya, where a hippopotamus and Jesus replaced the deer and president.\n\nThe project also delved into ugliness, producing \"America's Most Unwanted,\" a chaotic painting resembling an explosion in a corn-chip factory. The People's Choice project suggests there is something universal about what people find beautiful, implying that human nature shapes this perception.\n\nPsychologist Nicholas Humphrey, in his book \"Why Is the World So Beautiful?\", explores this concept further. Drawing from an evolutionary worldview, Humphrey argues that our innate desire to seek connections with nature leads us to find vistas that signify comfortable human habitation beautiful. This includes elements like water, greenery, animals, and other people.\n\nHumphrey extends this idea, proposing that our appreciation of beauty is fundamentally rooted in the concept of rhyme. Just as words can align in a pleasing way, so can images, objects, and ideas. For example, cat and mat rhyme due to their shared terminal -at, while a cat and a dog rhyme because they are both mammals, despite their differences. Humphrey suggests that the pleasure we derive from aesthetic enjoyment, whether in works of art or nature, is both cognitive and aesthetic, carrying a moral undertone.\n\nThe author argues that humanly created and naturally occurring beauty share similarities psychologically. Both are grounded in rhyme, and people intuit that beauty in nature has a creative presence, much like art has an artist. This sense of pleasure in beauty drives our intrinsic desire to understand and refine our grasp of the world's construction. Humphrey posits that the world is a poem, and we are constantly seeking the next line, as the laws of nature have designed the world to generate a pattern full of rhyme, making it comprehensible and livable.",
  "summary": "Nicholas Humphrey’s new book, Why Is the World So Beautiful?, posits a theory of beauty – but is beauty too manifold to surrender its mysteries to one theory?",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}