Split Second Stats #4: Engagement

Why, exactly, this would reduce variance is unclear. It may be because focusing on form instead of content means people don’t pay attention to things that might otherwise affect their rating of the painting, e.g. controversial subject matter. It may also create a situation where evaluation of the quality of the painting (as opposed to evaluate of its form) is passed along to the subconscious, and that (to extend Gladwell’s thin-slicing hypothesis) subconscious judgments may naturally tend to have less variance. This suggests yet another interesting direction for further research.

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