Saturday 14 November 2026 · Live on Zoom
The Aesthetic Instinct
A four-hour intensive on the instinctual drives underneath style, color and attraction, built on an IRB-approved study at the University of Oklahoma and taught by Sterlin Mosley and Aaron Addonizio. Twelve to four Central, with the recording sent afterward.
Register, $189
Most people can tell you within about a second whether a room is theirs, and almost nobody can tell you why, which is roughly the gap this afternoon is built to close. The preference arrives well before the reasoning does, fully formed and oddly certain, and the explanations we offer afterward tend to be reconstructions assembled to make a decision we had already reached sound deliberate. What we have been studying for the last two years is where that certainty comes from. The finding, which surprised us rather more than it probably should have, is that it appears to run along the instinctual drives rather than along taste, culture, or training.
The research
What the study actually found.
Between October 2025 and April 2026 we ran an IRB-approved study at the University of Oklahoma, protocol 14509, asking a single question: does a person’s dominant instinctual drive predict the aesthetic register they prefer. One hundred seventy-four people completed the survey, and of the one hundred fifty-two who returned one clear dominant instinct, 76.7 percent chose the register their instinct predicted, which is a concordance we did not particularly expect to hold as tightly as it did. (Full disclosure: Sterlin trained and certified through Leatrice Eiseman’s program at the Pantone Color Institute, which is perhaps exactly why the result needed a sample rather than a conviction behind it.)
The self-preservation instinct landed on the sensual register in 98 percent of cases, which is close enough to a ceiling to be worth sitting with for a moment, while the sexual instinct chose the magnetic register 81.5 percent of the time, and the social instinct came in at 44.7 percent, considerably looser than either. That looseness is itself probably the more interesting result, since the social instinct is built to track and adapt to the group rather than to hold a fixed position of its own, so a social-dominant person may well be reading the room accurately and choosing accordingly, which looks like inconsistency only if you were expecting a fixed signature in the first place. Across the ninety-nine people who had already named their own subtype, the instrument agreed with them 78.8 percent of the time.
98.0%
of self-preservation dominant participants chose the sensual register, n = 49
81.5%
of sexual dominant participants chose the magnetic register, n = 65
44.7%
of social dominant participants chose the communal register, n = 38
Overall concordance 76.7 percent across 152 participants, χ²(4, N = 152) = 135.47, p < .0001, Cramér’s V = .67. The full write-up sits on the Zykr research page.
The Instinct Aesthetic™
Three currents, four seasons, twelve registers.
None of which tells you what to buy, and that is rather the point. What the afternoon is about is why the pull exists at all, and about what it is doing when you walk into a room and feel either met by it or faintly corrected, which is a question nobody leaves with a shopping list for.
The afternoon
What the four hours hold.
The mechanics underneath
Jung's account of the unconscious sits underneath all of this, particularly the archetype understood as an inherited pattern of response rather than an inherited image, which is the distinction that makes color and season behave archetypally rather than decoratively. Our remembrance of the seasons is considerably older than any of our opinions about them, and that older layer tends to be where a palette does its work. Four hours is not enough time to teach Jung properly, though it is enough to show you the one idea of his that the findings keep landing on, which is that the pattern is inherited while the picture is not.
The three currents
Comfort, sustenance and shelter organize the sensual register, while the communal register reads as open and adaptive, with color chosen largely in service of the group. Magnetic runs on a deliberate intensity that does not particularly invite everyone, and it is the one people most often misread in themselves. They behave more like currents than like categories, and that matters a good deal when you try to place yourself inside one, since a current can be entered at several points.
The twelve registers
Three currents moving through four seasons gives twelve registers, and those registers may or may not even signal the elevation we tend to reach for when describing our own taste. Each one carries its own internal logic, and learning that logic will serve you considerably longer than learning the label does, because the label stops being useful at about the moment somebody disagrees with it.
Personal color, which is new
Seasonal color analysis has been practiced for forty years, largely as a service performed on somebody. What we want to do is put the instinctual layer underneath it. What reads as a flattering palette often turns out to be the palette your instinct was already reaching for, well before anyone held a drape up to your face and told you which one you were.
Attraction
Instinct appears to shape whom we are drawn to alongside what, and the overlap between a person's aesthetic register and the people they find magnetic is close enough to be mildly uncomfortable the first time you see it laid out. We will hold that part lightly. The sample was built to test preference in images rather than in people, so the attraction material is the least settled thing we will put in front of you.
This is for anyone who already knows their instinctual stacking and has noticed it turning up in places the model does not usually get credit for. It is also for people who have done enough Enneagram work to find the standard type descriptions thin. No background in color theory is assumed, and none is needed to follow the afternoon. If you have never encountered the instinctual drives at all you will still be able to follow it, though you will probably get more out of the second half than the first.
The details
Saturday 14 November, twelve to four.
- Date
- Saturday, November 14, 2026
- Time
- 12:00pm to 4:00pm Central, four hours
- Format
- Live on Zoom, with the recording sent afterward
- Seats
- Capped at forty
- Taught by
- Sterlin Mosley and Aaron Addonizio
- Prerequisite
- None
$189
One payment, recording included
Four hours on a Saturday afternoon, live on Zoom. The recording goes out afterward to everyone who registers, so a conflict that day costs you the room rather than the material. Seats are capped at forty, because the personal color portion stops working in a room much larger than that.
Register for the intensiveSterlin Mosley, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Human Relations at the University of Oklahoma and the author of The Narcissist in You and Everyone Else and Center of the Universe. He ran the study this material comes out of, and he trained through Leatrice Eiseman’s program at the Pantone Color Institute. Aaron Addonizio teaches and coaches across the Empathy Architects curriculum, and the instinctual work in particular has been built by the two of them together rather than by either one alone. The Instinct Aesthetic™ is their system, and the research behind it lives at zykr.studio.
