My Monkey Could Have Painted That

Take a look at the two images in this post. Which do you prefer? Which do you think is by a professional artist? (See the answer below.) For a paper in press at Psychological Science, Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner of Boston University collected 72 undergrads, 32 of which were studio-art majors, and showed them 30 paintings by abstract expressionists. Each painting was paired with a painting by a child, a monkey, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, or an elephant. The images were matched on superficial attributes such as color, line quality, and brushstroke, and subjects were asked which piece they personally liked more, and which they thought was a better work of art.

The first 10 pairs were unlabeled (signatures were scrubbed with Photoshop). Among the last 20 pairs, half were labeled correctly and half were labeled incorrectly (such that, say, a de Kooning was called a Koko and vice versa).

How did the students do? In all conditions, both art students and psychology students chose the professional works as more preferred and of better quality most of the time ... And preferences were pretty immune to labels.

Labels did manage to sway judgments of quality, at least among psychology students. While art students gave the same ratings to professional works no matter the condition, psychology students gave higher judgments of quality to pros when correctly labeled than when unlabeled or incorrectly labeled. (79% vs 66% and 63%, respectively.) So it seems evident that, most likely, your pet monkey could not have painted that.

If you're looking for a cynical take on the art world, however, here's your fodder: Even the art students preferred the child's or animal's painting over the professional's-and judged it to be objectively better 30 to 40 percent of the time. And that's even when they were labeled correctly ...

Rollover for answer: The painting on the left was by a 4-year-old named Jack Pezanosky. The one on the right is Laburnum Hans Hoffman.

Psychology Today