Cultural experience can shape which movements viewers notice, how they interpret a dance’s emotion, and what they find beautiful—but it does not determine a person’s response. Recent studies of Iranian dance report different patterns depending on who participated and what researchers measured. Together, they suggest that familiarity and embodied experience can matter alongside movement itself, while warning against treating nationality as a reliable shortcut for how anyone will see a performance.
What does cultural experience change when we watch dance?
Viewers do not necessarily bring a universal dictionary of movement to a performance. Learned conventions and experience can influence whether a gesture seems joyful, expressive, or beautiful, and which parts of the movement attract attention. The same step may carry different associations for people who have encountered its tradition in different ways.
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That does not mean a viewer’s background dictates a single interpretation. Cultural experience is better understood as one influence among others, not a fixed trait that can be inferred from someone’s nationality. Studies can also find similar overall enjoyment alongside differences in particular judgments: liking a performance, recognizing its intended emotion, and rating a movement as beautiful are distinct outcomes.
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Two studies published in 2026 examined responses to Iranian dance, but their results are not interchangeable. They used different samples, experiments, and measures—and one found no overall group difference in liking while the other reported group differences in ratings.
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A preregistered study of 120 participants
Christensen and colleagues presented Iranian classical dance stimuli to 120 Iranian, English, and Southeast Asian participants. The study found no overall difference among the groups in aesthetic liking, although Iranian and English participants showed sensitivity to joyful expressivity. Its analysis also found that English enculturation modulated aesthetic judgments, while Iranian enculturation did not; Iranian enculturation did predict greater reported importance of Persian dance. The authors argue that measuring enculturation continuously can reveal distinctions that broad group labels miss. Read the study in the Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science.
Three experiments with 242 participants
Khorsandi and colleagues reported a different pattern across three experiments involving 242 Iranian and English participants viewing Iranian dance stimuli. Iranian participants rated the dances higher overall than English participants, while joyful movements were preferred overall. Iranian participants also rated lower-body and staccato movements as more beautiful than English participants. The authors suggest that unfamiliarity with the subtle role of lower-body movement in Iranian dance may help explain that difference. In the reported judgments, intended emotion and movement type mattered more than motion energy or luminance. See the paper’s PubMed record.
These findings should be read together without flattening their differences. One study found no overall group difference in liking; another found group differences in ratings. They do not establish a universal rule about how Iranian, English, or Southeast Asian people respond to dance. As Julia F. Christensen put it in a Max Planck Society summary of five studies involving more than 500 participants from Iranian, English, and Southeast Asian backgrounds: “What matters here is not a person’s nationality or country of origin, but rather their familiarity and embodied experience with a cultural tradition.” The summary also reports that people more familiar with Iranian culture were more likely to perceive joy in the dances presented. Read the Max Planck Society summary, reprinted by Phys.org on October 6, 2026.
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Nationality is a broad category; familiarity and embodied experience describe a person’s relationship with a specific practice more directly. Someone may have learned a dance, watched it often, or encountered its conventions through family and community. Another person with the same national identity may have had little exposure. Those differences can matter when viewers interpret movement.
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Researchers can also measure enculturation as a range rather than divide participants into fixed cultural groups. In the 120-person study, the authors’ analysis of enculturation showed that cultural measures did not all relate to aesthetic judgments in the same way. This helps explain why a group label alone may miss meaningful variation within a group—and why findings from one dance tradition should not be generalized to every viewer or style.
Why movement type and emotion matter too
Culture is not the only factor in a viewer’s response. In the 242-person study, intended emotion and movement type were stronger modulators of reported judgments than motion energy or luminance. The preference for joyful movements across the participants also suggests that some responses may be shared even when ratings of specific movements differ.
That distinction is useful beyond research: “Did you enjoy it?”, “What emotion did you see?”, and “Which movement looked beautiful?” ask different questions. A viewer may enjoy a performance without recognizing its intended emotion, or appreciate its overall effect while finding a particular gesture unfamiliar. Treating all of these reactions as a single measure of “perception” can obscure what viewers actually agree or disagree about.
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A 2022 study offers a separate example using group movement rather than Iranian dance. British participants preferred asynchronous group dance to synchronous dance, while Japanese participants liked synchronous and asynchronous movement equally. The authors connect the difference to culturally specific social meanings of moving in unison. This result describes those study participants; it does not mean all British or Japanese viewers share the same preference. Read “Dance Across Cultures: Joint Action Aesthetics in Japan and the UK”.
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Dance carries history, identity, and power
Interpretation is not only about a visible movement and a viewer’s familiarity with it. Dance can represent and perform ethnicity, maintain or challenge identities, and evolve in response to social life. The history surrounding a tradition can shape what a performance means and how it is received.
Dance scholarship has documented exclusion and suppression, including racialized judgments about Black dancers’ suitability for ballet and bans on Indigenous and sacred dances. Anthropologist Susan A. Reed’s review also considers how movement connects to colonial cultures, gender and national identity, exoticization, and the making of social bodies. These histories matter: describing a dance as “exotic” can turn a viewer’s unfamiliarity into an apparent quality of the dance itself, while ignoring the tradition’s own context. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity examines dance, ethnicity, and identity; it is an academic reference work rather than a beginner dance manual. Read Reed’s review, “The Politics and Poetics of Dance”.
A more useful way to watch across traditions
When watching a dance from an unfamiliar tradition, it helps to separate what is visible from what you assume it means. Notice which movements draw your attention, then ask whether the performance or a reliable cultural source explains their role. Treat your first impression as one response shaped by your own experience, not as a verdict on the dance or a prediction about how others will see it.
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Quick Recap
- Ask what the performance is intended to express before assuming an emotion from a gesture.
- Consider whether a movement’s significance depends on a convention you have not encountered.
- Distinguish personal liking from judgments about beauty, expressivity, or cultural meaning.
- Seek the tradition’s social and historical context instead of treating unfamiliarity as evidence that a dance is strange or self-evidently “exotic.”
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