It has always been believed that songs with dubious lyrics provoke people to aggression, while positive lines, on the contrary, encourage people to do good. However, pleasant, positive music can paradoxically have the opposite effect, for example, making listeners more susceptible to calls for aggression.
Psychologist Naomi Ziv from the College of Management and Academic Studies (Israel) invited 120 student volunteers (96 women and 24 men) to take part in a study whose true purpose they did not know – they were told that they were studying the effect of music on thinking. The subjects were given the task of finding and underlining vowels in the text. Students from one group listened to background music, while others (from the control group) performed the task in silence. It was one of several tunes that survey participants found pleasant and positive.
The real testing was carried out after the end of the pseudotest. Background music continued to play, and the experimenter (male) turned to the student with a “personal request”: “One student came to college today specifically to take part in our study, because she is awarded extra points that she needs to successfully complete the course . But I don’t want to meet her, could you call her and tell her that I have already left?
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65,6% of the students in the group that heard background music agreed to this request, despite the fact that it was required to lie and thereby deprive the student of the points she needed. Of those who did the “test” in silence, only 40% agreed.
The second experiment involved 63 students (31 men, 32 women). After “testing” with or without music, the researcher (in this case, a woman) also turned to the students with the request: “One student was ill for the whole last semester. She will come to college today because I promised to give her all the study materials for the missed courses. But I don’t feel like doing it anymore. Can you call her and tell her that I’m not here?
81,8% of the students in the group that listened to background music (in this case, a song they knew they knew) agreed to the request. Among those who performed tasks in silence, there were only 33% of them. This is all the more surprising since the experimenter gave such a weak justification for her request (she allegedly just “reluctant” to meet with a student).
The authors do not yet know exactly the reason for such an impact of music. One of the hypotheses is that students, thanks to the sounds of familiar pleasant music, felt some emotional closeness with the experimenters and were more inclined to help them.
Подробнее см. N. Ziv et al. «Music and compliance: Can good music make us do bad things?», Psychology of Music, August 2015.