Last Saturday evening, my friend Lindsey and I attended the Dallas CityArts Festival, an annual outdoor celebration of visual and performing arts in downtown Dallas. We joined the throngs of people gathered along several city blocks in 100-degree heat to browse artists' booths, listen to music of varying genres, watch dances from different cultures, enjoy free admission to the local (air-conditioned!) art museums, and eat bratwurst and snow cones. Both Lindsey and I are artistic souls (she graduated with a degree in art; I was an art major for two semesters), and events like this thrill us to no end.
Although Lindsey and I arrived after the museums had already closed for the evening (much to our dismay), we thoroughly enjoyed looking at artwork by local painters, sculptors, photographers, and jewelry-makers. However, the plight of these artists saddened me somewhat. Here they were, sitting in stifling heat for the better part of three days, lost in the never-ending row of booths belonging to their fellow artists, watching as hundreds of people surveyed their work without so much as a word to the creators, and hoping - mostly in vain - that someone might actually love some of their work enough to BUY it.
Alas, it seemed that most of the patrons of the Dallas CityArts Festival were more interested in looking at art rather than buying it.
Despite my "artophilia", I myself, having only recently graduated from college, was certainly not in a position to fulfill the artists' hopes of selling their several-hundred-dollar artwork.
However, I experienced a curious psychological phenomenon as I wandered in and out of artists' booths: when I encountered a booth in which empty spaces and discarded price tags betrayed evidence that someone had actually purchased artwork there, I was much more eager to visit that booth and study the work therein. I was also more willing to investigate whether the artist had inexpensive prints or notecards that I might be interested in purchasing. If someone else had loved a piece enough to actually spend money and take it home, perhaps the artist's work was good enough that I, too, would like it and even want to buy it.
Researcher Robert Cialdini calls this psychological phenomenon "Social Proof" - the idea that we take cues from what people around us do. If others act a certain way, we assume that it is reasonable to act in the same fashion. This is especially true when we encounter new situations in which we are unsure of how to act.
If "Social Proof" affects us so much, maybe the artists at art festivals could use this principle to their advantage. A psychology-savvy artist looking to sell his work could set up his booth and hang his paintings around the tent, but intentionally leave one or two painting-sized empty spaces where a person would expect to see a piece of artwork. Then he could watch and see if more people than normal enter the booth interested in viewing and purchasing the art.
Would this have worked for the artists at the Dallas CityArts Festival? I don't know. But it wouldn't have hurt for them to give it a try.
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Monday, June 15, 2009
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Communication and Intelligence
We seem to measure intelligence by communication.
Granted, the “standardized” and “objective” measures of human intelligence, such as IQ tests, focus heavily on math and logic and pattern recognition and spatial reasoning. But in our normal, everyday lives, when we meet someone new, don’t we automatically assess the person’s brainpower by what and how well he communicates? If we know nothing else about two people, don’t we attribute a greater mental faculty to him who speaks with the thoughtful grammar and extensive vocabulary of a character out of Pride and Prejudice seems to possess a greater mental faculty than to him who makes gratuitous use of profanities, favors slang and lazy pronunciation, and haphazardly inserts the word “like” into his statements? Or, when we hire someone to say, fix a computer problem, don’t we think him more intelligent if he converses with us and explains to us how the computer thinks and why the problem occurred, instead of getting frustrated in his explanations or talking incessantly and incomprehensibly about some technological “thing”?
Perhaps this subconscious judgment is justified. After all, a large and properly used vocabulary is a sign of a well-educated person. Good communication requires a specific type of intelligence – that of knowing one’s subject matter, certainly, and of reasoning logically, and of reading one’s audience and understanding how to relate to them. Perhaps communication is not a bad standard for an off-hand measurement of intelligence.
But then, what happens when we communicate with someone whose native language is different from our own? When I was in college, several of my friends and acquaintances were international students. They came from Taiwan, Germany, Nigeria, Colombia, and a few dozen other nations, to study in the U.S. Some of them had been speaking English their entire lives; some had learned basic English just before they arrived.
As much as I love other cultures and try to be loving toward everybody, I found myself naturally drawn to those international students who could speak English almost as fluently as I, a native speaker, could. It was easier to exchange jokes and stories from our childhoods and commentary on music when we could understand each other without many confused looks. Although I tried not to feel this way, it was easy for me to get frustrated or bored when I would talk to a new friend with halting English.
And then I started thinking. All of these international students must be EXTREMELY smart. To travel half-way around the globe to study at a university where all classes are taught in a foreign language and only a few others (if any) can speak one's native tongue, must require incredible intelligence and stamina (not to mention courage). Especially for our friends from countries like China and Japan, whose studies required them to learn an entirely new alphabet, in addition to a language. Most American students struggle to keep up with classes in their own language, let alone a foreign one.
Yet, before I considered this, it was so easy for me to feel condescending toward a fellow student whose English was more limited than my own. Why? What causes us to judge someone's intelligence based on the ease with which they can communicate? Is it ever justified? And when it is not justified, what do we do about it?
Questions to ponder....
Granted, the “standardized” and “objective” measures of human intelligence, such as IQ tests, focus heavily on math and logic and pattern recognition and spatial reasoning. But in our normal, everyday lives, when we meet someone new, don’t we automatically assess the person’s brainpower by what and how well he communicates? If we know nothing else about two people, don’t we attribute a greater mental faculty to him who speaks with the thoughtful grammar and extensive vocabulary of a character out of Pride and Prejudice seems to possess a greater mental faculty than to him who makes gratuitous use of profanities, favors slang and lazy pronunciation, and haphazardly inserts the word “like” into his statements? Or, when we hire someone to say, fix a computer problem, don’t we think him more intelligent if he converses with us and explains to us how the computer thinks and why the problem occurred, instead of getting frustrated in his explanations or talking incessantly and incomprehensibly about some technological “thing”?
Perhaps this subconscious judgment is justified. After all, a large and properly used vocabulary is a sign of a well-educated person. Good communication requires a specific type of intelligence – that of knowing one’s subject matter, certainly, and of reasoning logically, and of reading one’s audience and understanding how to relate to them. Perhaps communication is not a bad standard for an off-hand measurement of intelligence.
But then, what happens when we communicate with someone whose native language is different from our own? When I was in college, several of my friends and acquaintances were international students. They came from Taiwan, Germany, Nigeria, Colombia, and a few dozen other nations, to study in the U.S. Some of them had been speaking English their entire lives; some had learned basic English just before they arrived.
As much as I love other cultures and try to be loving toward everybody, I found myself naturally drawn to those international students who could speak English almost as fluently as I, a native speaker, could. It was easier to exchange jokes and stories from our childhoods and commentary on music when we could understand each other without many confused looks. Although I tried not to feel this way, it was easy for me to get frustrated or bored when I would talk to a new friend with halting English.
And then I started thinking. All of these international students must be EXTREMELY smart. To travel half-way around the globe to study at a university where all classes are taught in a foreign language and only a few others (if any) can speak one's native tongue, must require incredible intelligence and stamina (not to mention courage). Especially for our friends from countries like China and Japan, whose studies required them to learn an entirely new alphabet, in addition to a language. Most American students struggle to keep up with classes in their own language, let alone a foreign one.
Yet, before I considered this, it was so easy for me to feel condescending toward a fellow student whose English was more limited than my own. Why? What causes us to judge someone's intelligence based on the ease with which they can communicate? Is it ever justified? And when it is not justified, what do we do about it?
Questions to ponder....
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