How do personality traits and art-related individual differences shape art viewing behavior in the museum? : explorations from a virtual gallery
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Rebekah M. Rodriguez (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Paul J. Silvia
Abstract: Personality and other individual differences play a role in art-viewing experiences but have proven difficult to study in field environments. Thus, I aimed to explore how personality can be reflected in encounters with art in the context of museums, using a virtual art gallery tool that allows participants to visit researcher-designed art galleries. A sample of n = 264 adults recruited from the Prolific.co survey platform was asked to respond to individual difference and personality questionnaires before freely wandering around a virtual gallery. The gallery spanned three rooms and contained 24 artworks (half abstract and half representational) of various sizes and genres. Using structural equation modeling and multilevel models, I examined how the Big Five personality traits, aesthetic fluency, and aesthetic responsiveness predicted visit behavior—including visit time, distance traveled, artwork viewing ratio, artwork viewing time, and artwork viewing distance—in a virtual gallery space. Openness to experience was shown to have robust, positive effects on all five behavioral outcomes: visit time, distance traveled, artwork viewing ratio, artwork viewing time and viewing distance. Extraversion also accounted for many viewing behaviors, including negative associations with visit time, distance traveled, viewing time, and viewing distance. Within-person, artwork area predicted increased viewing time and distance. Representationalness was also associated with longer viewing times. Further, openness showed interactions with representationalness and artwork area that strengthened their effects on viewing time and distance; extraversion, meanwhile, tempered the relationships between representationalness and both viewing time and distance outcomes. Taken together, this project has demonstrated how the individual patterns in thought, behavior, and experience that we come to the museum with affect our visit experience in ways that are difficult to capture with traditional field methods.
How do personality traits and art-related individual differences shape art viewing behavior in the museum? : explorations from a virtual gallery
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Created on 12/1/2022
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- Language: English
- Date: 2022
- Keywords
- Aesthetics, Art viewing, Museums, Personality, Virtual gallery, Visitor studies
- Subjects
- Art museum visitors $x Psychology
- Aesthetics $x Psychological aspects
- Virtual museums