Enculturation modulates aesthetic judgments of dance

Seasonal and other festivities with dance and music shape individuals’ aesthetic sensitivity to their cultural heritage. Yet, there is little empirical research about the influence of culture on dance perception. To fill the gap, this paper presents a pre-registered experiment with 120 participants (Iranian, English, Southeast Asian), that investigated the influence of cultural group (categorical variable) and enculturation (continuous variables) on aesthetic judgment to emotionally expressive Iranian classical dance stimuli. We also explored how culture and enculturation modulated responses to the question ‘how important is the cultural heritage of ‘Persian dance’ for you?’. Education, age, motion energy, and aesthetic responsiveness served as covariates across all models. Our data served to explore an important question in cross-cultural empirical aesthetics: which type of variable best predicts the influence of culture on questions about a cultural heritage like dance—categorical or continuous culture variables? Surprisingly, there were no overall differences in aesthetic judgment between the groups, although Iranians and English participants were most sensitive to joyful emotional expressivity of the dancer. Aesthetic judgment was modulated by English, but not Iranian enculturation. Conversely, Iranians found Persian dance more important than did the other two groups. In all analyses, aesthetic responsiveness was a significant covariate, while education, motion energy and age were not. Effect sizes (partial η 2 s and β s) were higher for continuous enculturation measures, than for the categorical variable cultural group . We recommend using continuous enculturation variables in cross-cultural empirical aesthetics research to allow higher granularity when exploring the impact of culture on perception.