deviant art and artist impact

In 2022, I wrote my Bachelor's thesis at the University of Amsterdam. Together with my group, we conducted research in a social psychological realm.

Research so far showed that artists that deviate in their art style are perceived as more impactful. In this cross-cultural study, we investigated whether this effect is moderated by cultural tightness-looseness. It was hypothesised that countries that are culturally tighter (i.e., have more rules and a higher degree of sanctioning when those rules are broken) would show an attenuated effect, that is, not perceive deviant artists as more impactful than non-deviant ones. We used an experimental

design where we compared German, Greek, Japanese, and Dutch participants using the cover story that they had to evaluate an artist’s Instagram account. They were either shown a series of similar paintings, or a series with three similar paintings and one deviant painting as the most recent one. The results showed that there was no interaction between the country and artist deviation, thereby not confirming our hypotheses. This was explained by several methodological issues.

Read the thesis here.