A kinder heart: how art can make people more open-minded, less xenophobic

Ars gratia artis – art for art’s sake – goes the famous saying.

But is there a higher purpose of art or the artist? That is the question a team of researchers set out to explore.

The international team, led by researchers at the University of Vienna and in collaboration with the Dom Museum in Vienna, Austria, was trying to find out whether art exhibitions would make humans kinder and more understanding and lead to changes in attitudes and behaviours.

What they found was uplifting—Museumgoers reported lower negativity (xenophobia) and higher positivity (acceptance of refugees).

The exhibition, “Show Me Your Wound (Zeig mir deine Wunde)”, that ran through September 2019, allowed viewers to look inward and to contemplate the fragility and vulnerability of fellow humans.

The findings of the study come amid growing anti-migrant sentiments across the world, especially in Europe, where asylum seekers and Muslims are facing growing attacks by nativist groups.

The growing anti-migrant sentiments have also resulted in the ongoing far-right violence in Britain, which has left a trail of destruction across the country.

According to the Dom Museum Wien website, “The works shown span the Middle Ages to modern and contemporary art, exposing very different approaches to the subject of wounds, such as the vulnerability of the artists’ own bodies or the slicing of the canvas.”

In a second study, the researchers used a cellphone-based sampling method to continue tracking a sample audience and find out whether and how long the changes lasted.

The cumulative work, called “How Lasting is the Impact of Art? was recently published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

“We really did not know what to expect … The possible impact of art exhibitions on how people think or feel is a hot topic, but there is very little actual evidence,” lead author Matthew Pelowski from the Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, tells TRT World in an email.

“As a lover of the arts and a strong believer of art’s deep societal importance, I hoped we might find robust evidence.”

In a separate press release, Pelowski says that the effect of art on humans has become a subject of growing interests among researchers.

"The question of how art might make us more conscious and empathic citizens or modify people’s responses towards societal challenges such as climate change, and refugees, is a growing interest for art institutions, artists, and for municipalities and cultural policy makers,” he adds.

According to Pelowski, the reason the researchers decided to conduct the study was because "despite high interest, there is surprisingly little data on whether visiting an exhibition or viewing an artwork really does anything, especially regarding its effect on how we think and behave. How long effects might last or what kind of effects we might find are entirely unknown."

One of the curators of the show at the Viennese museum, Klaus Speidel, adds that "in recent years, there has been a shift in how we view art in our societies. The arts are no longer seen as purely recreational, but rather as a powerful, and often untapped, resource for health, learning, and personal or societal well-being."

How the study was set up

The research team set out to collect data and come to a better understanding of the effects of art on viewers.

They started out by assessing visitors’ experiences of the exhibition curated by Johanna Schwanberg and Klaus Speidel at Dom Museum Wien.

When putting together the exhibition, the curators were quoted as saying they wanted to "encourage visitors to reflect on a crucial issue of humankind” and to "bring about positive change."

The researchers devised a two-stage study: They stopped potential visitors to ask them whether they would participate in the study in exchange for a free ticket. All the visitors had to do was report their thoughts and feelings regarding, as a press release put it, “their empathic concern for others and their feelings of xenophobia or willingness to accept refugees into their country.”

They were questioned once before the visit and once after.

Upon discovering this effect of art on visitors, the researchers decided to question further: they would explore whether these effects would last, and for how long.

The research team then recruited a second group of 41 people using an experience sampling method (ESM). This second group of visitors was asked to install an app on their mobile phones and report on their thoughts and actions each day.

The app's results were tracked for two weeks—one week before and one week after the exhibition visit.

When the researchers compared the reports from the week before the exhibition to the week after the exhibition, they found several effects.

They wrote in the paper: “People indicated rising scores on the empathy-related questions regarding feeling that the people they were with had “an influence on their mood”, as well as for “today I paid attention to my inner feelings” when comparing previsit scores, the day of the visit, and to the day following.”

As artists and curators begin to address political, social and anthropological issues troubling the world today, a study like this proves valuable because it can reveal the significance of the art world and how they can help touch the hearts and minds of participants.

"The current Venice Biennale, for example, which has the title of 'Foreigners Everywhere,' has been the topic of a large number of recent discussions around the impact of arts on people’s mindset regarding immigration. Our study now strongly supports the idea of exhibitions being a reliable tool to shed light on social issues", says Pelowski.