Abstract:

Evidence, anecdotal and scientific, suggests that people treat (or are affected by) products of prestigious sources differently than those of less prestigious, or of anonymous, sources. The products  which are the focus of the present study are poems, and the sources  are the poets. We explore the manner in which the poet s name affects the experience of reading a poem. Study 1 establishes the effect we wish to address: a poet s reputation enhances the evaluation of a poem. Study 2 asks whether it is only the reported evaluation of the poem that is enhanced by the poet s name (as was the case for The Emperor s New Clothes) or the enhancement is genuine and unaware. Finding for the latter, Study 3 explores whether the poet s name changes the reader s experience of it, so that in a sense one is reading a different  poem. We conclude that it is not so much that the attributed poem really differs from the unattributed poem, as that it is just ineffably better. The name of a highly regarded poet seems to prime quality, and the poem becomes somehow better. This is a more subtle bias than the deliberate one rejected in Study 2, but it is a bias nonetheless. Ethical implications of this kind of effect are discussed.

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