Abstract

A psychology experiment was created to test whether personality had an effect on art content preference, specifically looking at extraversion and introversion. Forty-five college students were asked to complete the Big 5-Short Inventory as a measure of personality traits, then rank 12 paintings and 12 photographs separately, based on overall preference. The Big 5-Short assesses five different personality traits, those being extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. There were artworks from three different categories: portraiture, landscapes, and still-life images. Each image was identified by a letter of the alphabet, and the participants were asked to look at the paintings first and rank them in order of their own personal preference, and then repeat the process with the photographs. It was believed that extraverted people would prefer portraiture, as those images depict people, and that introverted people would prefer landscape images, as they lack the presence of people; the results found that individuals higher in extraversion did show a higher preference for portraiture, while those higher in introversion showed a higher preference for artworks depicting landscapes. The results were consistent with the initial hypothesis, as they were trending in the correct direction, but were not statistically significant. Previous studies have looked at personality traits and art preferences, but focused on other traits, mainly openness to experience. This study focused on the trait of extraversion, and was designed to test the interaction between this trait and the presence or absence of people in different artworks.