Social Influences on Individual's Live Performance ExperienceFinal Project for MAS.630   Fall 2011

Akito van Troyer

Conceptual image of the project

From previous studies on social influence on media consumptions, we understand that our media consumption habits, neural mechanisms, and emotions can be influenced by various social inputs such as friend recommendations and public rating systems. Based on these studies, we conducted an experiment to see whether a real-time social influence during a live music performance could affect individual’s performance experience. In specific, we hypothesized that the live performance experience will be overall more engaging when social inputs are present than when they are absent. We collected subjects’ electrodermal activities and self-report measurement of emotional states during the observation of videos on live music performances to assess their engagement level. Moreover, we asked subjects to fill out surveys after each video session that asked subjects’ emotional states. Based on the analysis of collected datasets, we did not see any significant trends in subjects’ live performance experience when social inputs were present. We suspect that the result were not promising because of the way we designed our experiments.