Cross domain consistency of aesthetic preference-driven social behavior

Aesthetic preference is a primary driver of social behavior in the digital era, yet the extent to which these preferences remain consistent across disparate domains remains poorly understood.

We hypothesize that aesthetic judgment is governed by a domain-invariant latent structure, such that individuals who exhibit similar preferences in one category will demonstrate comparable alignment in seemingly unrelated domains. To test this, we recruited 37 participants to evaluate stimuli across three distinct aesthetic domains: art, faces (male and female), and scenes. We developed a novel computational framework that reformulates cross-domain preference as a user-based collaborative filtering problem, encoding individual profiles through inter-subject similarity matrices.

Our model successfully predicted participant responses in a target domain based on their similarity to the cohort in a separate source domain. These results demonstrate robust cross-domain consistency, suggesting that aesthetic evaluation is mediated by an abstract, domain-general mechanism rather than being purely stimulus-dependent.

We propose that this consistency is rooted in a shared neurophysiological pathway, likely involving the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the Default Mode Network (DMN), and discuss how these findings provide a foundation for more sophisticated, cross-modal recommendation systems and the study of individual social identity.