Musical taste and the representativeness heuristic

The present research investigated how people judge the musical taste of others. In Study 1, participants were asked to judge the likely musical taste of 10 fictional individuals. Participants’ judgements of musical taste exhibited a common bias in keeping with stereotypes of musical taste; this bias...

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Main Authors: Lonsdale, A., North, Adrian
Format: Journal Article
Published: Sage Publications Ltd. 2011
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/22819
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author Lonsdale, A.
North, Adrian
author_facet Lonsdale, A.
North, Adrian
author_sort Lonsdale, A.
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description The present research investigated how people judge the musical taste of others. In Study 1, participants were asked to judge the likely musical taste of 10 fictional individuals. Participants’ judgements of musical taste exhibited a common bias in keeping with stereotypes of musical taste; this bias was believed to stem from the use of the representativeness heuristic. Study 2 confirmed this, showing that an individual’s similarity to stereotypical music fans, rather than base-rate estimates of musical taste, was significantly related to predictions of their likely musical taste. This suggests that an individual’s relative similarity to stereotypical music fans might act as a heuristic ‘rule of thumb’ used by people to quickly and economically judge their likely musical taste.
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institution Curtin University Malaysia
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publishDate 2011
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spelling curtin-20.500.11937-228192017-09-13T13:59:01Z Musical taste and the representativeness heuristic Lonsdale, A. North, Adrian The present research investigated how people judge the musical taste of others. In Study 1, participants were asked to judge the likely musical taste of 10 fictional individuals. Participants’ judgements of musical taste exhibited a common bias in keeping with stereotypes of musical taste; this bias was believed to stem from the use of the representativeness heuristic. Study 2 confirmed this, showing that an individual’s similarity to stereotypical music fans, rather than base-rate estimates of musical taste, was significantly related to predictions of their likely musical taste. This suggests that an individual’s relative similarity to stereotypical music fans might act as a heuristic ‘rule of thumb’ used by people to quickly and economically judge their likely musical taste. 2011 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/22819 10.1177/0305735611425901 Sage Publications Ltd. fulltext
spellingShingle Lonsdale, A.
North, Adrian
Musical taste and the representativeness heuristic
title Musical taste and the representativeness heuristic
title_full Musical taste and the representativeness heuristic
title_fullStr Musical taste and the representativeness heuristic
title_full_unstemmed Musical taste and the representativeness heuristic
title_short Musical taste and the representativeness heuristic
title_sort musical taste and the representativeness heuristic
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/22819