judgment

Been a while since I blogged - I missed it!  Been very busy with Groupanizer and Realtime's third album, so Owning The Stage has been on the back burner.

However, I've been coaching quartets a lot and I continue to be amazed at how effective it is to coach through the vehicle of story. I don't choose that vehicle with every group, but if they have a baseline level of skill and they have been working at their craft for long enough to acquire some bad habits, I always start with story - not for any philosophical reason, not because I have a point to prove (although I do), but because in my experience it's the most efficient and pragmatic way to get a singing group to the next level.

This year I read a great book called "Blink!" that talks about how people are wired-up to make very quick, snap emotional judgments.  It's a great read.  For example, you can predict with 90% accuracy whether a couple is going to get divorced in the next few years by watching just *fifteen seconds* of video of them interacting.  (I hope I'm remembering those numbers correctly...)  Anyway I found that pretty fascinating, and wondered what conclusions we might draw about stage performance, and specifically the psychology of audience members.

As it happens, this past weekend I was with Realtime in Boise, Idaho fo the Evergreen District convention, and working with some groups as well.  Often when I work with groups, I tell them that first impressions are important, and that the audience (and in contest the judges) are drawing a lot of conclusions about you in the first few seconds after you walk on stage, and I decided to put this theory to the test - I decided to watch the whole quartet contest, and score all the quartets just fifteen seconds after they walked on stage, and long *before* they started singing.  Then I compared my snap emotional judgments to the official scores, as determined by a triple-panel of judges in three categories.  Here are the results:

So as you can see, I had some close results and some really bad ones! Of the 25 quartets, I was within plus or minus 5 points 17 times. I was "way low" on three quartets, and "way high" on five.

In my own defense, I am *not* a trained judge of barbershop. If I had a lot of experience giving scores to groups, I might have done better. The real judges tend to agree pretty well on their scores, even across categories. Having said that, there were some ten-point discrepancies within one category in this very contest, so it's not quite a science.

What can we learn from this? Well I was able to determine with *some* accuracy how each group would score without actually hearing them sing. My snap emotional judgments are pretty accurate. The way I like to look at it, the groups told me what they were expecting to score with their body language and attitude, as soon as they hit the stage. And remember, the judges are human too - no amount of training is going to make you completely immune to your snap emotional judgments. The judges are all highly trained, very talented individuals with the best of intentions, but their first impressions (and in some cases existing knowledge) has to bias the scoring to some extent.

Audience members would be even more likely to take a first impression and stick with it. Ideas have inertia in your brain - it's easier to make a new impression than to change an existing one. If you expect a group to be great, you're much more likely to think that they were, no matter how they actually perform!

Food for thought, if you care about how people react to your performances, and what impressions they take away.