Cross-Cultural agreement in perception of animal beauty: boid snakes viewed by people from five continents
Abstract
Animals, and snakes in particular, are evolutionary relevant stimuli for humans. Therefore we hypothesized that humans may inherently share not only ability to categorize animal species in a similar way but also agree in their aesthetic preferences to other living kinds.
We tested human preferences to 32 species of boid snakes in six culturally distinct populations of three continents and compared them to our previous data from Europe and Papua New Guinea. A surprising agreement in ranking of individual species was revealed across the studied ethnic groups.
Our results support the hypothesis that human aesthetic evaluations are universally shared, at least when snake stimuli are concerned. We suggest that the revealed cross-culturally invariant component of human preferences to other species is worth of attention considering coexistence of humans with other species as well as the fact that human attitudes to other species are increasingly important due to their consequences for conservation biology and animal welfare.