The Vision Heuristic: Judging Music Ensembles by Sight Alone

Team effectiveness and group performance are often defined by standards set by domain experts. Professional musicians consistently report that sound output is the most important standard for evaluating the quality of group performance in the domain of music. However, across six studies, visual information dominated rapid judgments of group performance. Participants (1062 experts and novices) were able to select the actual winners of live ensemble competitions and distinguish top-ranked orchestras from non-ranked orchestras based on 6-s silent video recordings yet were unable to do so from sound recordings or recordings with both video and sound. These findings suggest that judgments of group performance in the domain of music are driven at least in part by visual cues about group dynamics and leadership.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  Unknown venue

• Publication date

  2012-07-01

• Fields of study

  Computer Science, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.5465/AMBPP.2012.12822ABSTRACT
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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