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.
1 comment:
That's definitely true. I think that they definitely stacked things in the favor of sensationalist though. A couple things come to mind:
- It mentions that a small crowd gathered -- there is a pretty small number of people that can listen to a street performer at once, (you won't stand there if you can't see the guy)
- Going to work in the morning is not really the mindset where people are necessarily paying attention/processing things that they hear
- Stopping in their morning routine for 20 minutes is not necessarily an option for many people.
I like the followup about the painting, but it just confirms what I've always believed.. a very small number of people know value in art, and everyone else trusts their judgment (either that, or we're all fools :)
-Rob
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