Instinct predicts what we find beautiful.
An IRB-approved study at the University of Oklahoma asked one question. Does a person’s dominant instinctual drive predict the aesthetic register they prefer? It does, and more strongly than expected.
Aesthetic preference is not arbitrary.
Psychologists have long recognized that attention is organized by a small number of survival drives. They work below awareness. They decide what we notice, what we want, and what we move toward. The study focused on three of them, Self-Preservation, Social, and Sexual, which the framework renames Sensual, Communal, and Magnetic.
The claim under test was simple. If these drives shape what we attend to, they should also shape what we find beautiful. A person high in Self-Preservation should prefer the Sensual register. A person high in the Social drive should prefer the Communal. A person high in the Sexual drive should prefer the Magnetic.
- Institution
- University of Oklahoma, IRB protocol 14509
- Period
- October 2025 to April 2026
- Platform
- Qualtrics. Voluntary, anonymous, informed consent
- Recruitment
- The Empathy Architects subscriber list, professional networks, and social media
- Participants
- 174 completed the survey. 167 had usable instinct scores. 152 showed one clear dominant instinct and form the sample for the figures below; the rest had two drives tied at the top and were set aside for the categorical test
- Sample
- 128 women, 31 men, 5 non-binary or other. Mean age 46, range 20 to 81. 62 percent had prior familiarity with the instinctual subtype model
- Instruments
- An instinct identification battery adapted from the author’s 2021 research, and a seasonal aesthetic preference instrument of twelve original collages, one per profile
Two instruments, and no question about taste.
The first instrument scored each participant’s dominant instinct. It was adapted from the author’s earlier published research on the instinctual drives.
The second showed twelve original collages, one for each combination of register and season. Participants chose the collage that felt most like their own from each seasonal block. Nobody was asked whether they preferred warm or cool, quiet or dramatic. The pictures did the asking, and the choices were added up into a preference score for each register.
The two scores were then compared. If the framework holds, the register a person prefers should match the drive that leads them.
- Wave 1
- n = 91
- V = .60
- Wave 2
- n = 146
- V = .65
- Wave 3
- n = 152
- V = .67
The Communal current is the quietest signal, and it is supposed to be.
The three pairings did not hold with equal strength, and the difference is itself a finding. Self-Preservation was close to deterministic. A drive oriented toward bodily comfort produces a stable aesthetic signature. The Sexual drive was similarly robust.
The Social drive came in at 44.7 percent, and the number says something true about the drive. Social participants split almost evenly between Communal and Sensual, with a smaller share choosing Magnetic. The Social instinct is built to track and adapt to the group, so it holds its preferences more loosely than the other two. Inward-facing drives produce stable signatures. The outward-facing one produces an adaptive signature, and the data reflect that directly.
The pattern held in the other direction too. When a Sexual participant did not choose Magnetic, the second choice was Sensual. Communal was almost never picked by the other two groups.
In practice this changes how a founder is read. A client whose references contradict each other may not be confused. They may be Communal.
For a person
The visual worlds you return to are an expression of your instinctual orientation, and they were there before anyone taught you what to like. Knowing your native register gives you a more precise way to recognize yourself, and a place to build from.
For practitioners
For coaches, therapists, designers and stylists, a client’s aesthetic preferences are legible. They point to something structural, and they can be read.
For brand identity
The gap between a brand that looks competent and one that feels like its owner is a diagnostic gap before it is a design gap. The framework gives that gap a name and a method.
The sample came mostly from one community, skews toward women in midlife, and most of it already knew the instinct model. Whether the pattern holds in a general population is an open question, and the next study is designed to ask it.
Participants with two drives tied at the top were left out of the categorical test. They may be a real group, people whose instinctual energies are more evenly spread, and the concordance figures apply to those with a clear dominant drive.
The preference instrument asks which world feels most like you. That question suits the two inward-facing drives better than it suits the Social drive, whose preferences are relational by design. A Social-specific instrument is the obvious next step.
The study grew out of the author’s work in personality psychology at Empathy Architects, where the three instinctual drives had been in use for years. A 2021 lexical analysis study, in which people described how they wanted to be seen and named the symbols and colors they associated with themselves, produced patterns that would not go away. Its instinct identification component, a set of collages rather than a questionnaire, identified a person’s dominant drive with 76 percent accuracy, and that instrument became the first half of this study. Reading later into seasonal color psychology, the two systems looked like one. The study tested whether they were.
Mosley, S. L., and Addonizio, A. (2021). Enneagram lexical
analysis research report 2021. Empathy Architects.
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral
sciences (2nd ed.). Erlbaum.
Full methodology is available through the University of Oklahoma IRB
study record.
A seventeen-page companion sets out the framework, the study, and the full statistical summary. It includes the identification collages, so it is shared on request rather than posted.