What happens if one of the best musicians popped up at a corridor of a stereotyped arcade unannounced, garbed in a nondescript attire (to assume the role of a mendicant) and played some his best music, would the person or his music be recognized?
The Washington Post conducted an unusual experiment in January 12th 2007 along with American Grammy Award winner violinist Joshua Bell to determine people's priorities and perceptions.
According to the Washington Post,
``It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.
The complete article here.(HT: David Kotok)
click on the video to see experiment...
Joshua Bell whose violin had a price tag worth $3.5 million and whose concert ticket prices are worth more than $100...collected a measly $32.17 cents after 43 minutes of play. Some even gave pennies!
Why is this of interest to us?
Because the experiment reveals of people's survivorship bias where, to quote Nassim Taleb in his Fooled by Randomness, "we are trained to take advantage of the information that is lying in front of our eyes, ignoring the information we do not see."
In this case, for the 1,097 people that came by (except for one), the crowd didn't recognize the person or underappreciated or undervalued his music (got only $32.17). And of the $32.17, $20 or 62% even came from the person who recognized the multi-awarded artist.
Without some form of stimulus or conditioning (e.g. advertising), his talent or his music had simply been overlooked or ignored. To consider, people have paid over $100 to watch his concert! This gets us thinking: are people paying more for the ambiance or crowd or for social purposes than to merely watch the artist and his music?
Of course the best objection would be that he could be playing into the wrong audience or market. But that won't be convincing.
I think the lesson from the experiment is that there are simply many undiscovered talents, or skills or works of art/music out there which have been underrated simply due to our reliance on heuristics or cognitive biases for valuation.
In short, people use intuition more than rationality.
The Washington Post conducted an unusual experiment in January 12th 2007 along with American Grammy Award winner violinist Joshua Bell to determine people's priorities and perceptions.
According to the Washington Post,
``It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.
The complete article here.(HT: David Kotok)
click on the video to see experiment...
Joshua Bell whose violin had a price tag worth $3.5 million and whose concert ticket prices are worth more than $100...collected a measly $32.17 cents after 43 minutes of play. Some even gave pennies!
Why is this of interest to us?
Because the experiment reveals of people's survivorship bias where, to quote Nassim Taleb in his Fooled by Randomness, "we are trained to take advantage of the information that is lying in front of our eyes, ignoring the information we do not see."
In this case, for the 1,097 people that came by (except for one), the crowd didn't recognize the person or underappreciated or undervalued his music (got only $32.17). And of the $32.17, $20 or 62% even came from the person who recognized the multi-awarded artist.
Without some form of stimulus or conditioning (e.g. advertising), his talent or his music had simply been overlooked or ignored. To consider, people have paid over $100 to watch his concert! This gets us thinking: are people paying more for the ambiance or crowd or for social purposes than to merely watch the artist and his music?
Of course the best objection would be that he could be playing into the wrong audience or market. But that won't be convincing.
I think the lesson from the experiment is that there are simply many undiscovered talents, or skills or works of art/music out there which have been underrated simply due to our reliance on heuristics or cognitive biases for valuation.
In short, people use intuition more than rationality.
1 comment:
Interesting, but I think what this actually shows is that people value music more highly when they have chosen the time and location to listen to it. I've walked past buskers many times, some of them quite talented, but I rarely have time to stop and listen properly and I don't feel any need to pay them - after all, I didn't ask them to play. People paying $100 to see this guy were also paying for a seat in a concert hall and probably an orchestra, so I really don't see a valid comparison. Might have been interesting to repeat the experiment with someone more people would recognise and appreciate - what if it was Neil Young, or Chris Martin?
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