Why Art Makes Us See Stories in Everyday Life

Social cognition is our ability to understand things we can’t directly see, like other people’s thoughts, feelings, or intentions. It helps us explain and predict how others will act. A key part of this is mentalizing—imagining what someone else might be thinking or feeling.  Mentalizing also plays an important role in how we experience and interpret art.

We explored how an art context changes the way people see unclear or abstract images. In our study, participants looked at ambiguous paintings and were told either that the paintings were created by an artist or generated by a computer. When people thought the paintings were made by an artist, they described them using more emotional words (like “sadness” or “anger”), behavior-related terms (like “fighting”), personality traits (like “loneliness”), and symbolic ideas (like “good versus evil”). In contrast, when they thought the paintings were computer-generated, they focused more on describing shapes, colors, and patterns.

We also tested if this tendency to assign meaning in an art context spills over to non-art situations. Participants watched a video of moving geometric shapes, and we found that they were more likely to assign emotions (like “fear” or “jealousy”), behaviors (like “chasing” or “dominating”), personality traits (like “motherly”), and symbolic meanings (like “domestic violence”) to the shapes.

This shows that experiencing art changes how we interpret the world, even beyond the art itself, making us more likely to see meaning and stories in ambiguous situations. These findings are reported in t he article titled ‘Art schema effects on upregulation of social cognition’, which is currently under review in the journal Social Cognition.