Why and how do we incorporate others’ judgments when making an aesthetic evaluation? We investigated this question by studying social transmission of aesthetic evaluations via natural language, which conveys richness that more common (numerical) measures may fail to convey, such as the reasoning behind a judgment. Participants in a large-scale study aesthetically evaluated photographs, either independently or after observing testimony from another person. We found that participants formed more similar evaluations to the testimony they observed (than the asocial control). Furthermore, participants who received the same evaluative testimony wrote evaluations that were more similar to each other in content but not sentiment (relative to a matched asocial cohort). This suggests that social influence on aesthetic evaluations may have a greater informational aspect than previously understood.