Speaking of Psychology - What psychology has to say about art, with Ellen Winner, PhD

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

Art is universal – there has never been a human society without it. But we don’t always agree on what makes for good art, or even what makes something art at all. Ellen Winner, PhD, of Boston College, talks about how psychology can help answer the question “What is art?” why even non-experts can tell the difference between a child’s painting and an abstract masterpiece, why art forgeries bother us so much, the purpose of arts education, and more. Links: Ellen Winner, PhD Speaking of Psychology Homepage Sponsor: Newport Healthcare Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is sponsored by Newport Healthcare, providing results-driven mental health treatment for teens and young adults ages 12 to 28 who are struggling with trauma, depression, anxiety, and co-occurring issues like eating disorders and substance abuse. Newport's integrated programs incorporate evidence-based experiential activities such as art therapy alongside trauma-informed clinical modalities. Learn more at Newport Healthcare.com. It's a modern art cliche. A museum visitor stands in front of an abstract painting of colorful shapes and lines and shaking her head says, my four-year-old could do that. Art is universal. There has never been a human society without some type of visual, musical, or other art form, but we don't always agree on what makes good art, or for that matter, what makes something art at all. Philosophers have long tried to answer those questions, and more recently, psychologists have waited. in as well, applying scientific research methods to try to understand why people make art, how we experience it, and how it affects us.

So what does make something art? What makes something good art? Is it true that your kid could do that, or can a lay person tell the difference between a child's painting and an abstract masterpiece? Why do forgeries bother us so much? Why do we even care if a painting is an original or a skillful copy? Does artistic talent have to be inborn or can it be developed through years of hard work? Why do we have such strong emotional responses to art?

And what is the purpose of arts education? And how should art be taught in school? How can psychology help us answer all these questions? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Ellen Winner, a professor emerita of psychology at Boston College, and Senior Research Associate at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Dr. Winner has spent decades studying the psychology of art and the impact of arts education. She has written more than 200 articles and authored or co-authored seven books, including her two most recent, How Art Works, a psychological exploration, and an uneasy guest in the schoolhouse, art education from colonial times to a promising future. She has also served as president of APA's Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and Arts, and as a fellow of APA and of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics. Thank you for joining me, Dr. Winnu. Thank you so much for having me, Kim. Let's start with the big question. What is art and why is it so hard to come up with a definition for it? And how can psychology help us to think about

what makes something art? Well, that is, of course, the big question. Some people think that you can't be a psychologist of art unless you have a definition of art, but philosophers have argued over the centuries about how to define art, and there has been no agreement. Every time somebody has put forward a definition of a set of necessary and sufficient features that would make something art, people come up with counter examples. If you say it has to be beautiful, people will give you ugly art.

If you say it has to be intentional, people will give you a splattered paint blob that some people frame and put on their walls. So I think that the reason that art is so difficult to define is because artists are always pushing the boundaries and trying to make things, make art that people never would have before thought of as art, such as a hunk of metal, of scrap metal. or a pile of trash, conceptual art, a chair in the middle of a room, who would have thought those would be considered art in the 19th century? And in fact, in the 19th century, people couldn't accept the impressionists as art. They thought it was hideous, and they said it's not art. So it's because artists are always messing with our concept of art by trying to push the boundaries.

And that's why some philosophers, and I agree with them, say art is an open concept. It's ever expanding. And we can talk about what's typical in art, what are the characteristic features of prototypical works of art. But we will never be able to come up with a set of necessary and sufficient features that tell us this is art, this is not art. which also in some ways explains why, for example, people didn't like the impressionists at first, and now we think that they were brilliant. So the concept of how we accept art changes over time. I mean, people rioted when they heard Stravinsky's Firebird suite the first time, and yet today, it's a loved piece of music. It's not as if the art changes, it's people's conception somehow changes.

Absolutely. Art, our evaluation of works of art change over the centuries. Some work were reviled, and now are loved, and the opposite as well. So that speaks to the question of whether we are simply influenced by what's in vogue. And some psychologists have argued that we only like what's familiar. And once we got familiar with the impressionists, we started to think they were great. And certainly we are influenced by the gatekeepers of art, the people who decide what goes into museums and what goes into art history textbooks. And there is a big argument about whether we're just influenced by what's in vogue or whether we really can see what's great in art.

And we can see what's objectively great in art. So there's a big argument about whether our aesthetic opinions of what is good and bad art is based on objectively provable claims or whether it's just a subjective opinion like I like vanilla and you like chocolate ice cream. So going back to that person in the museum looking at, for example, a Jackson Pollock painting and saying, my kid could do that. Is that person right? You've done research that's tried to answer that question empirically. What have you found? Well, we've done a series of studies looking at whether ordinary people who claim to have no particular knowledge about abstract art, whether they can tell the difference between works by four. four-year-olds and works by famous artists, abstract expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock or

Sy Twombly or Mark Rothko. And we also have thrown into this jumble works by animals. Elephants, monkeys, and chimpanzees have been given paint brushes, either in the wild, elephants in the wild, kind of captured in the wild, or apes and monkeys in cages. And they have made abstract art. And the question is, is it true that there is no distinction that we can make? And we've shown in a whole series of studies that people, ordinary people, not art experts, but just ordinary people who don't know that much about abstract art, are significantly above chance. When you show them a pair of images, one by a famous artist and one by a child or an animal, unlabeled, they are significantly above chance in choosing the better work of art,

the one they like better, the one they think is more intentional, the one they think is more structured. Those are always the actual artist. That doesn't mean they're 100% correct. And the more they think it's unintentional, like a work by sigh Twombly often looks like just an unintentional scribble, the more they think something, a work by a famous artist is unintentional, the more likely they are to confuse it with that of a child or an animal. So we're not 100%, but we are statistically, significantly above chance in our ability to distinguish this body of work by famous artists from ones that look superficially similar. We've done the study in a whole number of ways, and it always comes out the same. So people are wrong when they say

my kid could have done that. And they actually know more about abstract art than they think they do. And it's important to hear that the studies have been replicated, which is sometimes a challenge in psychology. That's right. Psychology has had a replication crisis, but we've done about six studies on this using different methodologies, and it keeps coming out the same. So people often think that children's drawings are just a less competent, messier version of adult art, but you argue that kids approach making art in an entirely different way from adults. Can you talk about that and what can we learn about the way children drawing paint? Well, for a long time, people thought of children's art as just error-prone and something that needed to be corrected. And traditional art education teaches children as quickly as possible how to draw like adults or how to draw realistically. This is how you draw a head. This is how you draw a person.

But with the progressive era in the beginning of the 20th century, with progressive education came progressive art education. And there came the view that the child is an artist in his. her own right. And we should look at the kinds of things that children do which look like, quote-unquote, errors. But they're really children's solutions to how to solve the very difficult problem of taking the three-dimensional world and mapping it on a small piece of two-dimensional paper. And so children, what we have to realize is that children are not striving to be realists. They're not trying to draw realistically. They're trying to create a readable representation. so that when you look at it, you will see a person, too, if they've drawn a person.

And they're striving for the simplest possible graphic equivalent of a person. Rudolf Arnheim, great psychologist of art, really stated this in the most clear way that I've come across, that children are seeking the simplest possible structural equivalent on a page. And they don't care if the sun is purple. They don't care if a person has arms coming out of his or her head. I mean, a tadpole, children often draw tadpoles. pole, what we call a tadpole for their first drawings. It's a circle and their arms coming out of the circle for the arms. Sorry, their lines coming out of the circle for the arms and the legs. If you say to

children, where do arms come from? And they ask you to look at, you ask them to look at them. They'll say they come from the shoulders. Well, why do you draw them coming out of the head? Because I like to do it that way. Because they're not striving for realism. And so another really interesting thing that Rudolph Arnheim pointed out is that a lot of the quote-unquote errors that children make can be seen in works of art by famous artists. For instance, showing multiple perspectives, showing there's a famous drawing of that Arnheim published of two children playing chess, and you see their side views, but the chess board is shown standing up straight so that you could see the entire chess board. And Arnheim found the equivalent of that in a medieval painting. So why,

Why do artists do this? Because it's a way of showing the clearest view of each thing they're drawing. The clearest way to show it's a chess board is to stand it up. But the clearest view to show two people sitting at a table is to draw them in profile. Children are not bothered by mixed perspectives. And of course, if you look at cubists in the 20th century, that's exactly what they sought. So there are many ways to draw. And realism is just one way to put the three-dimensional world on paper.

So what about child prodigies? What do child art prodigies do differently from other children? And what's the difference between a prodigy and someone who's just talented? Well, with my former student, now colleague Jen Drake, who's at Brooklyn College, we have been studying art prodigies for quite a while. And we have a website now with art prodigies works featured on them. And almost all of them start out drawing. in a very different way than I just described. They start out drawing very realistically. If you look at a three-year-old's drawing of a person,

a typical three-year-old, you'll see something like that tadpole I described. Just one circle with lines emanating from it and maybe two eyes and a smile. We have three-year-old's drawings of people that are highly differentiated. There's a head, there's a body, their legs, their arms, there's fingers, there's eyelashes.

They're not perfectly realistic, but there's certainly a long way away from the tagpole towards the realistic spectrum. And we call them precocious realists. There are some, however, who start out abstractly. And you can actually find them on the web. Their parents are marketing them as abstract expressionist prodigies. And when I looked at those, I said to Jen, you know, I think these are just typical three-year-old drawings of abstract drawings.

They're charming, they're beautiful. I love child art, but these are not gifted. Well, Jen took the abstract art prodigies, quote-unquote prodigies work, and she paired it with typical preschoolers work and with works by famous abstract artists. And the interesting thing she found is that people actually can tell the difference between the abstract art prodigies work and the typical children's abstract work, showing that maybe these kids really are gifted. They're just gifted in a different way from our precocious realists.

So there may be two roots to giftedness. You also asked, what's the difference between giftedness and talent? And I would say, you can use either word. I don't care. They're the same to me. The question is the degree, the degree of talent or the degree of giftedness. And a prodigy is extreme. They're kids that are less gifted but are still somewhat slightly above their age in how they draw.

In terms of what happens to these prodigies when they grow up, Well, that's another question we could talk about. Do child prodigies tend to be kind of obsessive, like they get up in the morning and they want to draw? And when they come home from school, they want to draw more and you've got to tear them away? I coined a phrase when I wrote my book, Gifted Children, Myths and Realities. I wrote about academically gifted children as well as musically and artistically gifted. And I said they had a rage to master. And people told me not to use that word because they said it sounded like anger.

But I stuck to it. And for some reason, this term has caught on, and I keep bumping into it in places. And parents tell me that's exactly what they see. They can't stop their kids from doing what they're doing. So we had one kid who, the minute he woke up, he asked for his crayons and paper. He drew during breakfast. And he drew during kindergarten. His teacher didn't like that.

I guess she wasn't a very progressive teacher, but she tried to get him to stop. I've had parents say they have to force their kids to stop to go out and play and get some fresh share. We had the same kid who used to wake up and ask for his drawings and his paper and crayons used to invite kids home after school. And then it turns out he just wanted to draw them. He wanted them to pose for him. So these kids often have social issues because they're so different from other kids. But yes, they are obsessed with their area of high ability. And this is true with kids who are academically gifted as well or musically gifted or sports gifted. Well, let's move away from kids for the moment and talk about art and emotions.

There are some forms of art that really move people deeply. And I ask this because some people can listen to a piece of music or read a novel and be moved to tears, but you don't go to an art museum and see people standing in front of paintings weeping. What is happening in our brains that makes us react differently to different media? Some people actually do claim that they cry in front of paintings, And there is a book by James Elkins called Pictures and Tears. But I think it's much, much rarer than crying at music. One thing is that music has words often, and I think often people are crying at the sad lyrics.

And I also think that if you see people in concerts and they say they're moved to tears, they may be moved to tears, but they're not actually weeping. But I do think, and this is really a speculative, on my part. It hasn't really been thoroughly tested. That people experience greater emotions when they listen to music than when they walk through an art museum. And I think this is because the, first of all, music mimics the sound of the human voice. At least some instruments do. And that is very powerful emotionally, a violin or a cello. Well, a cello is too low, but a violin particularly. And that is very powerful.

High voices are happy, low voices are sad, very loud voices can also be anxious, sudden noises can be anxious. So that's one reason. Another reason is that when people listen to music, they sit for a long time and they're enveloped in the music because the music takes place over time. When people go to an art museum, they just walk right by pictures really quickly. and they're often with somebody else and they're chatting away. So the real test would be to put somebody in front of an emotional painting, like Mark Rothko's paintings, because Mark Rothko said he was painting pure emotion. Put them in front of it alone, maybe in a darkened room where all they can see is the lit-up painting

and have them talk about their emotions over 20 minutes. And I think if you did that, you would get much more emotional responses to visual art. maybe not as much as to music, but I just, when you listen to music and you have lyrics, you're not just moved by the music, you're also moved by the words. When you look at visual art that's representational, you're also moved by the content. So if you see somebody weeping at the death of their child,

that's very emotional, but you can't separate the content from the fact that it's, art. And so therefore, I think the best test is to take music without lyrics and abstract art and look at which one causes a more emotional reaction. And I think it will be the music. Is that something you're planning to test? I hope that Jen Drake tested. And we did test it informally. I tested it in my seminar of psychology and art over the years. And each time I did it, people said they had, I asked them to come in and give me their three most powerful feelings when listening to music without lyrics and with looking at abstract art.

They all came in for the music and talked about sad, nostalgia, joy. For the abstract art, they often said puzzled, confused, irritated, annoyed, because they didn't know how to look at it. But nobody came in and said and mentioned a powerful emotion from abstract art. These are kids that didn't know much about abstract art. And again, they hadn't been put in the circumstances that I'm describing, which would be the ideal way to test it. There are people that have gone to the Mark Rothgo Chapel and left sentences in the guest book as they were leaving, saying that they were moved to tears. But I think that's multi-determined.

You're in a chapel. You're surrounded only by Mark Rothgow, and you're sitting for quite a while. And then people do feel very emotional. And now we're going to take a short break. This episode is sponsored by Newport Healthcare, offering sustainable healing for teens and young adults struggling with mental health issues and co-occurring disorders, including depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. Newport offers a full continuum of care at locations across the country to young people ages 12 to 28, with tailored treatment plans that include creative

therapies like art and music to tap into the healing power. of self-expression. Learn more at newporthealthcare.com. Now, you've done some interesting research on the question of authenticity and why we care about whether a painting is an original or a copy. It's not just about the monetary value either. You've found that people actually like a painting more if they're told it's an artist's original rather than an exact copy made by an assistant. Yes. So why does originality matter so much to us? Well, you described the study exactly. write, we asked people in different conditions, how much do you like this work? We asked them a whole

range of evaluative questions. And in one case, we told them that it was the original, the first work in a series of 10 identical paintings by artist X, and it was worth X amount on the market. In another case, we said this is the identical painting, and it was done by the artist's assistant, and this is not an immoral thing. This is something that is done in the art world all the time, and it is worth the exact same thing on the market, and it has the artist's signature on it even. And then in another case, we said this is done by a very clever forger, and it's worth much less on the market. So when people are shown something that they're told as a forgery, they don't like it. Okay. So we know that already, because there are lots of studies showing that if you tell people to forgery,

they value it less. So for us, the key question was the comparison between the people that thought it was the first in a series and was done by the artist and the people that thought it was the second in a series done by the artist's assistant worth the same amount on the art market both signed by the artist both identical and people still valued the one by the artist better and since we'd taken away monetary value and since we had taken away immorality by saying that it was nothing immoral about it and we actually asked people to assess how moral or immoral it was for the assistant to do this. And then we factored that into our statistical analysis. So we, quote, unquote, controlled for that.

So even when we got rid of morality and monetary value, people still wanted the one by the artist more. And our argument is that what's left is simply knowing that it was touched by the hand and the mind of the artist. and that there's something here which psychologists like to call essentialism, that the painting by the artist has something of the artist's essence in it. And this is a mystical, magical belief. And if you push people, they would say, well, I know it's not really there, but that's really the way I feel. There's something special about knowing that Leonardo's hand actually touched this canvas,

or this actually came out of Leonardo's mind. So I think it comes down to thinking that you're reading the traces of the artist's mind. when you look at the work. And we're not interested in the traces of a copier's mind because the mind is less interesting. And we feel that way about a lot of things. I think there's the example of you lose your wedding ring and you go out and buy an exact copy of the wedding ring and you wear it, but it's never the same thing because it's not the one you got on the day of your marriage. Exactly. You can see essentialism everywhere in special objects. Yeah, right. So special objects. Let's say a work is deemed a masterpiece. Let's talk about the Mona Lisa, for example. Now, if Rembrandt had painted two of them

exactly alike, would we see them do you think as equally valuable and beautiful? And if not, why not? Are they equally valued? You could argue that they wouldn't be because we like scarcity. And if you look at prints, they are where you have an artist who makes an etching and then you have like 100 numbered prints. And then you have unnumbered prints. The numbered prints are more valuable than the unnumbered, but prints are always less valuable than the painting. And it may well be because there's many of them.

And with a painting, you only have one. And I think if you had two identical Mona Lisa's, you would say, which one is the real one or which one is the one that was painted first? And actually, there is some evidence that people like the thing that was made first by the artist if they were two identical things. Even if the second one is better. Well, I'm talking about two identical things.

If an artist makes two identical things, people like the one that was made first. And there is some empirical evidence for this, and it had to do with a album on a Beatles record, if you remember what a record is. And I don't remember the details, but I do remember that when people were told this was the first one made,

they valued it more. when it was the later one made. People are superstitious, mystical, even very rational people. Yes. So we recently had another psychologist on this podcast, Paul Bloom, who talked about why people choose to suffer. Yes. So why do we seem to like to do things that cause us emotional or even physical pain?

And one aspect of that is that people often want to look at artwork or listen to music that makes them sad? What's your take on that? Why do we seek out art that makes us sad? Or horrified or disgusted or angry, yes. That is a big puzzle. But I think we have a little bit of take on this. We seek out works of art that make us feel negative emotions

when we would run away from situations in our real life that would make us feel those same emotions. So, for example, we may look at Goya's painting of a firing squad. And this is a very famous painting, and we look at it and admire it and are very moved by it. But if we were actually seeing a real firing squad, many of us would turn away because we couldn't bear it. and if it was somebody we knew in the firing squad, we would be screaming our head off. So one argument is that when we're looking at something that we know is art, it's fiction. It's not happening to us.

So we don't have to do anything about it. And therefore, it's safe. We can feel these feelings of sorrow, for example, without feeling that we have to go deal with this and fix it and keep it in our life forever. We're choosing it. It's not inflict. I think Paul Blum talks about chosen suffering and unchosen suffering. Unchosen is much worse. We choose to look at these works of art and we're in control and we know we can turn away and we know it's just art so it's safe. And there are two really important things to say about this. One is Winfrey Menninghouse in Germany has shown that when people look at art that elicit's negative

emotions, not only is it more attention-grabbing, but it's also very moving. And moving is a feeling that's mixed with positive and negative emotions. And the feeling of being moved is actually very pleasurable. So when we look at negative art, we do feel negative emotions, but we also feel positive emotions mixed in, perhaps because of the beauty of the art, but also, and this is the second point I wanted to make, because of the meaning we make of it. Meaning making is is pleasurable and feels good and is something that we want to do. And we may think about the firing squad in Boya or Picasso's Guernica and think about war and injustice. We may also savor the negative feelings. And this is what it's like to feel horror. This is what it's

like to feel grief without having to feel it in our own personal lives. So we can savor it, we can think about it. So art makes us think, negative art makes us think, and it moves us and gives us a mixture of positive and negative feelings. And the last thing I'll say to that is I think that the greatest art and the greatest novels and the greatest species of music are often things that are very sad or tragic. If you think of Shakespeare's works, we love the tragedies. Many people think they're greater than the comedies. So your most recent book is about arts education.

And there's been a lot of debate over the years about whether art and music education can boost achievement in other areas. For example, does learning to play a musical instrument boost kids' math scores? And you argue that there's really not much evidence for that, but that arts education is valuable for its own sake. Can you talk about that? What's the intrinsic value of arts education? How do we know that it's really not improving us in other areas? Okay. Well, this was work I did with Lois Hetland, colleague of mine, and this was done quite a while ago, 20 years ago, was our first foray into that, we were skeptical about the claim that art education makes kids do better in school, because what that really means is art education

improves kids' math and verbal ability, and we weren't sure what the mechanism for that would be. So we did what's called a meta-analysis, where we compiled studies by other people and grouped like-minded studies together, so studies that were only about visual arts or only about music, and have the same kind of outcomes, test scores, verbal scores, math scores, and we conducted a large statistical study on this body of works as if it was one big study. And what we found over and over again is there was a correlation between art education and doing well in school. The correlational studies showed, yes, kids who take a lot of art actually do better in school. But when you look at the experimental studies that tried to look at causality

by taking kids and randomly assigning them to art education or non-art education and looking at improvement over a year, there was nothing. So we came out with a paper called Mute Those Claims, no evidence yet for transfer. And transfer of learning from one area to another has been notoriously hard to prove in psychology. People used to think that learning Latin made you more logical. Well, that's been shown not to be right. Learning Latin makes you better at Latin.

So people were very angry at us for coming out with these findings. They said, you shouldn't have published this because this is what we need to keep the arts in school. And we said we're trying to change the conversation because as soon as a smart superintendent finds out that it's not true, he'll say, well, then let's get rid of the arts. Or he might say, or she might say, if what we're doing this for is to improve test scores, let's just have direct test score prep because that's obviously going to be more effective than indirect training. So we were really reviled for a while. We were told that we were going to ruin quality arts education for the kids in this country. We decided we should do something positive. So we said, well, let's look at what the arts do teach.

And so we did a big ethnographic study of visual arts learning in two high schools. And we filmed, we interviewed, and in the end, we did a qualitative study where we came out with habits that we saw a number of very important, big, broad habits of mind being taught in these classes. We didn't measure learning. That would come later. We measured teaching. And we argued that the real benefit of visual arts education is that kids are learning to do very important things that are not going to translate into test scores. They're learning to look carefully. They're learning to reflect on their own works and process and evaluate it. A very important skill. They're learning in critiques to accept criticism and change their works accordingly. They're learning to express

personal meanings in their work. So observation, expression, reflection, engagement. They're learning to be very engaged, to stick to things over time. These are big, broad habits of mind, which we think are very important to have. They can be taught in any subject, but we think they're often best talk in art classrooms with a studio atmosphere and with critiques. And so we had a book, we wrote a book called Studio Thinking, The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education, and we're now coming out with our third edition. And we also wrote one called Studio Thinking from the start,

which is about how teachers have taken this and translated it into very young kids' art education. So I think that the real benefits of arts education are teaching. teaching kids to think like artists, and it has nothing to do with how well they're going to do on their SATs. And it shouldn't. Art shouldn't have to justify itself in terms of something else. We don't ask math to justify itself in terms of art, for example. Right, right. So what about adults? Does experiencing art, like listening to music or reading novels or looking at great paintings make us any smarter or more insightful or more empathetic? Do we know? Actually, I've just been involved in a series of studies on art and empathy, but we've been looking not at visual art, though one could. I've been looking at narrative art, both in stories and in film. To do a study like this, what you need to do is take a group of people and assign them randomly to a story and to a nonfiction or a non-narrative form with the same content. And then measure there, we've been looking at empathy, measure there. their attitudes about something before and after.

We chose to have people read a book about undocumented immigrants. It's a memoir, so it's not fiction, but it is a story. It's called Dear America Notes on an Undocumented Immigrant by Jose Antonio Vargas. It's a very moving book, and it's about the suffering that people face. When they discover their undocumented, these are people that were brought over as children, not even knowing there was such a thing as documentation. And then they discover as adolescents, they're undocumented, they have to hide, they can't get driver's licenses, they can't apply for financial aid, they're stressed, et cetera.

And we had the other group read factual information about the plight of undocumented immigrants, but it wasn't in story form. And we measured their attitudes about undocumented immigrants before and after reading, and then again one month later. And we did two studies, we're just now doing a third. But in the first study, we used undergraduate college students, who were already pretty sympathetic to undocumented immigrants. And we did find that the story, the memoir, moved their attitudes and the direction of empathy.

And the nonfiction did not. So we said, okay, well, we took people that were already positive and we pushed them to be a bit more positive. Let's see what we could do with people who are starting out negative. So we did a study where we only enrolled people who identified themselves as conservative, because we know that there is a correlation between being conservative and being anti-immigrant. that has been shown factually, empirically. So in this study, people started out negative, and they moved to significantly more positive

if they were in the memoir group. But we're now doing... So I think that was a very good piece of evidence. I was actually very skeptical, because I think it's very easy to say, oh, art makes you empathetic, fiction makes you empathetic. It's very hard to actually prove those things.

You feel empathetic, because you feel you're empathizing with the characters, But that doesn't mean you're going to change how you are once you close the book or turn off the movie. So I was surprised at our findings. We're now doing a third study to see if we really, really get this effect because we had a problem in our first two studies. The memoir and the factual text were not the same length. The factual text was much shorter because we didn't think we could get people to read a 200-page factual text. So now what we've done is we've shortened the memoir.

We had excerpted the memoir to 20 pages and we've got 20. 20 pages of highly readable media text about undocumented immigrants. So we'll see if we still get the effect. Huh. So that's interesting, an area where you're working. What are some of the other unanswered questions out there that you would like to see answered? Well, one question I would really like to see answered is what kind of, what are the early signs in artistic giftedness and visual art giftedness that predict actually becoming an artist

as an adult, a creative artist? because most gifted kids do not go on in their area, no matter how precocious, most of them do not go on as adults to become great creators in that area. So a mathematically gifted child, a very child prodigy in math, is not necessarily going to become a giant in math. They might become an accountant or a math professor, not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just, and they might even drop out of their field of math. So I'm interested in what are the different predictors that lead a child. prodigy to go on in visual art. And it can't just be that they're good at drawing realistically, because the art world today doesn't even value that. So one of the prodigies I studied is still

drawing highly realistically as an adult, and he's teaching art somewhere. But his art is never going to be considered great, I'm sure, because it's just totally realistic, and we've had that. So what are the factors you might look at? I mean, is it parental encouragement or mentorship? What are the factors? Right. So one of the factors. is being really interested in the art world. And I'm interested in which kids, which of these prodigies, and that could be an effective parent too, but which of these prodigies actually want to look at what artists have done?

Because they then understand that they're part of a larger community of artists. And I think another thing that's been speculated about what predicts which prodigies go on to be creators is that they have a certain person they're not satisfied with the status quo. They want to change things. And so after they master an adult invented field like math or realistic drawing, they then want to shake things up and explore and experiment and try new things. And if somebody wants to do that, I think they're much more likely to go on to be a creator in their field. So those are two aspects that I think might predict, making the leap from a prodigy to a creator in the visual art, in the visual arts.

So that's one thing I would like to look at. I also don't think we've at all nailed this thing about empathy and art. William James once said that he worried about the Russian lady sitting in the theater, weeping over the plight of the characters on stage while her coachman was outside freezing. And I think that says a lot. It means that we can feel extremely empathetic towards characters and fiction, but remain unchanged as soon as we step out of the fictional world. It's almost as if we've paid our empathy dues, and now we can go back to being as hard-hearted as we wanted. And I, it feels good to say art makes us empathetic. It's a feel-good statement. I would like it to be true. But I think we need a lot more work in that area than my, than what we have

so far in fiction. And we don't have this kind of study at all with music or with visual art. Well, Dr. Winter, this has been fascinating. I really appreciate you're taking the time today to talk to us. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me, Kim. It's been a pleasure. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www. www.combeatingof psychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're listening on Apple, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org.

Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Wynerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condihan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.