Sex, complexity, and preferences for residential facades

Analysis of variance was used to find out how much variance in preference for residential facades could be attributed to places or people. In accordance with previous findings based on other stimuli, places accounted for more preference variance than did people (16% vs 0%). More focused results were obtained for the subjective factor of sex and the objective design features of number of turns in a silhouette and the percentage of a facade covered by small visual elements. Preferences across sex correlated at .98, indicating that this demographic distinction had a very small effect. The objective factor of visual complexity had a multiple correlation of .90 with preference, indicating a strong effect. These results indicate that design features were much more effective than subjective factors in predicting preferences for environments. Moreover, this finding was reproducible over different samples of people and places.