New research published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, & the Arts finds that people’s moral values shape how they judge paintings of nude figures.
Nudity occupies an uneasy place in art: it can be treated as beautiful, sacred, heroic, or liberating, but it can also be judged as shameful, obscene, or morally troubling. Researchers Kim N. Awa and colleagues frame this tension through philosophical debates about whether aesthetic value and moral value move together. Some traditions link beauty with goodness, while others argue that art can be aesthetically valuable even when it challenges moral comfort or social convention. This makes nude artwork a useful case for asking why some viewers approach such images with curiosity or appreciation, while others respond with discomfort or disapproval.
The researchers examined this question through Moral Foundations Theory, which proposes that people differ in the moral values they prioritize. Individualizing moral foundations, such as care and fairness, emphasize autonomy, harm prevention, and protection of individuals. Binding moral foundations, such as loyalty, authority, and purity, emphasize social order, tradition, group cohesion, and standards of decency.
Because nude artwork can be read either as artistic expression or as a violation of social norms, the authors expected individualizing morals to predict more favorable responses to the art and binding morals to predict more negative responses.
This project included two studies with separate undergraduate samples recruited from a large public university in the Southeastern United States. Both studies included 124 participants who evaluated paintings of nude or exposed women or exposed men, respectively. Participants completed the studies remotely in exchange for course credit.
The 16th to 20th century paintings came from publicly available art collections, including museum sources such as the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as other public searches where the artwork’s provenance could be traced. To keep the visual content relatively consistent, the researchers selected paintings in which one nude or exposed figure was centrally featured, without other clearly visible surrounding figures. The figures were posed sitting, reclining, or standing, and the researchers attempted to standardize features such as body size and skin tone so that responses would be less likely to reflect differences in perceived attractiveness unrelated to nudity itself.
For each painting, participants rated how beautiful, interesting, and pornographic they thought it was, how uncomfortable it made them feel. These ratings used scales running from “not [adjective] at all” to “very [adjective].” Participants also answered an open-ended question for each image: “How does this painting make you feel?”
The authors analyzed these responses with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count-22 to generate an emotional tone score, with higher scores reflecting more positive emotional tone. After rating the paintings, participants completed the 30-item Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which assessed care, fairness, ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and purity on 6-point scales. The authors then created broader individualizing and binding moral foundation scores from these subscales.
Study 1, which focused on paintings of nude women, revealed that people who more strongly endorsed individualizing moral foundations rated the artwork as more beautiful and more interesting. In contrast, people who more strongly endorsed binding moral foundations rated the artwork as less beautiful, felt more discomfort while viewing it, and judged it as more pornographic.
The broader pattern suggested that viewers who prioritize autonomy, care, and fairness were more likely to approach nude artwork positively, whereas viewers who prioritize social order, tradition, and communal norms were more likely to respond with unease or moralized disapproval. Further, paintings rated as more beautiful were generally rated as more interesting and emotionally positive, while higher discomfort was linked with seeing the artwork as more pornographic.
Study 2, which focused on paintings of nude men, produced a largely similar pattern. Higher endorsement of individualizing moral foundations again predicted seeing the artwork as more beautiful and interesting. Higher endorsement of binding moral foundations predicted seeing the artwork as more pornographic, feeling more discomfort, judging it as less beautiful, and showing less interest in viewing it. When the authors examined the five moral foundations separately, care predicted more positive evaluations of male nude artwork, while ingroup loyalty and purity were associated with judging male nude artwork as more pornographic.
Across both studies, the findings supported the authors’ central claim that moral values help shape aesthetic responses to nude art, even when the images are presented as fine art rather than explicitly sexual material.
This work further demonstrates that reactions to nude artwork are not only about the artwork itself, but are also shaped by the viewer’s moral priorities, which may help explain broader disagreements about art, censorship, education, and public display.
Of note is that these paintings showed single nude male or female figures, even though many historical artworks present nudity in group, religious, or socially meaningful scenes.
The research, “Individualizing and Binding Moral Values as a Function of Evaluations of Artwork Depicting Nudity,” was authored by Kim N. Awa, Mitch Brown, and Darya L. Zabelina.
