No, the idea is that there are reasons for trends that have to do with people, culture and society. The fact that trends are a product of our very complex society means that the explanations for these trends can be studied from an academic perspective. Aesthetic trends aren't created by programmers, that's for sure.
I'm not an inherent skeptic of the worth of the soft humanities, but it's pretty far fetched to claim that these fields can offer anything like a unified or even non-contentious view on design elements, or anything else for that matter. If anything, the virtue of these fields is based on the multiplicity of interpretation they offer. They ain't Newtonian physics, that's for sure.