context matters

This Washington Post article describes an ingenius experiment. Get a bona fide violin virtuoso (Joshua Bell) to masquerade as a street musician and perform for the rush hour crowd to study whether its reaction is different given the high quality of the music they are hearing.

It's a long and informative article and I don't want to spoil the results for you, so go read it. But the bottom line is, context matters. The surrounding environment and pre-existing conditions to sensing a stimulus are every bit if not more important than the stimulus itself in determining how it is received.

Note the interesting corollary mentioned in the article about the $5MM Ellsworth Kelly painting hung in a restaurant and given a price tag of $150. No takers.