Noam Tractinsky, an Israeli scientist, was puzzled. Attractive things certainly should be preferred over ugly ones, but why would they work better? Yet in the early 1990’s two Japanese researchers, Masaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura, claimed just that. They studies different layouts of controls for ATM’s. All versions of the ATM’s were identical in function, the number of buttons, and how they operated, but some had buttons and screens arranged attractively, the others unattractively. Surprise! The Japanese found that the attractive ones were perceived to be easier to use.
Tractinsky was suspicious. Maybe the experiment had flaws. Or perhaps the result could be true of Japanese, but certainly not of
Israelis. “ Clearly,” said Tractinsky, "aesthetic preferences are culturally dependent.” Moreover, he continued, Japanese culture is known for its aesthetic tradition, “ but Israelis? Nah, Israelis are action-oriented- they don’t care about beauty. So Tractinsky redid the experiment. He got the ATM layouts from Kurosu and Kashimura, translated them from Japanese into Hebrew, and designed a new experiment, with rigorous methodological controls. Not only did he replicate the Japanese findings, but contrary to his belief that usability and aesthetics “were not expected to correlate” – the results were stronger in Israel than in Japan. Tractinsky was so surprised that he put that phrase” were not expected” in italics, an unusual thing to do in a scientific paper, but appropriate, he felt, given
the unexpected conclusion.
In the early 1900’s Herbert Read, who wrote numerous books on art and aesthetics, stated, “it requires a somewhat mystical theory of aesthetics to find any necessary connection between beauty and function,” and that belief is still common today. How could aesthetics affect how easy something is to use? Emotions, we now know, change the way the human mind solves problems—the emotional system changes how the cognitive system operates. So if aesthetics would change our emotional state, that would explain the mystery.
Until recently, emotion was an ill-explored part of human psychology. Some people thought it
1/3
