Psychology: Does Music make you more helpful? (1/2)

Hello and welcome back to the world of psychology. Influencing behavior via music or love is in the air. Does specific music increase helping behavior and does it even improve your chances to pick up a girl? It sounds like a plausible hypothesis, doesn't it? Good music, uplifting music can make us feel good. And when we are in a good mood, we are more willing to help, we are just more open. But not every plausible hypothesis must be true. For example, many people think if they solve a crossword puzzle every day, they become more intelligent. But in fact, there is no evidence for this, probably because you get used to solving the crossword puzzles and after a while, it's just routine. It's no longer hard work for your brain. But what about the good music, good mood makes us helpful hypothesis? Well, there is some evidence and one of the first landmark studies was published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology having the title Music Have Charms and Can Influence Helpfulness. 80 students, 40 women and 40 men participated in this study and they were told, well, we make a study about music effects on mood. This cover story was not a complete lie because in fact, they wanted to know how the music changed the mood. But of course, they knew from other studies that music is able to change the mood. But what they were really interested in was whether the changed mood can lead to differences in helping behavior. And in order to investigate this, they randomly assigned the 80 participants to four groups. So there were 20 subjects per group. One group was listening to soothing music. These were two songs from Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words. The second group was listening to stimulating music, which was Duke Ellington's One O'Clock Jump. The third group was listening to annoying music. That was John Coltrane's Meditations. Whereas the fourth group, this was a control condition, didn't listen to music at all. They were just sitting there for seven minutes doing nothing. Of course, this can be problematic. Just sitting there and doing nothing might be annoying for some participants as well. Before and after listening to the music or doing nothing like in the control condition, participants had to answer some questions about their mood. And after their second mood rating, they thought, well, the experiment is over, I can go home now. But rather than just dismissing the participants, the experimenter, which was a female student, told them about her problem. She said, I'm working for a professor who's giving me really far too much work. And of course, under absolutely no obligation, you have to comply with this request. But it would be really great if you could participate in another study, because I really have to recruit some more participants. Any support between 50 minutes and two hours would be very helpful. So obviously, the researchers were interested in how the participants would answer to this request. And what do you think? Which participants were most willing to help the student? Those who had listened to soothing music, those who had listened to stimulating music, or maybe even those who had listened to aversive music, because a problem shared is a problem halved. Well, the participants that were most willing to help were the participants who had listened to soothing music. On average, they decided to help for more than 50 minutes. Whereas in comparison, participants who had listened to no music only agreed to help for about 30 minutes on average. And participants who had listened to aversive music said they would help for about 20 minutes. One weakness of this study is that it was conducted in the laboratory. And the focus of the participants was strongly directed on the music. I mean, they were told that the study was about how the music changes their mood. And therefore, they were more focused on the music than you are in your normal life. So what we need is a field study like the study from North, Tarrant, and Hargreaves published in 2004 in the journal Environment and Behavior and having the title, The Effects of Music on Helping Behavior, a field study. And in this study, music was listened to in the way we usually listen to music. It was just the background music while other things were going on. And in this study, music was playing in the background while people, they had a good number of participants, they had 646 participants, while people were practicing in a gym. And while they were practicing, there was either playing uplifting music, which was music from the British top 20, or there was playing annoying music, which was avant-garde computer music. And if you've ever listened to this kind of music, you know, it's not about nice melodies, it's more about creativity and new ways of music. So after working out, the participants had listened to either uplifting music or annoying music for a good deal of time. And before they left the gym, they were handed a printed sheet telling about funding problems of the BDAA, the British Disabled Athletes Association. And this association definitely needed more money to support the disabled athletes. So the participants were also asked to distribute leaflets. A list of 10 dates for leaflet distribution was provided, and the participants should indicate on which date they had time and how many leaflets they were willing to distribute. They could choose to distribute just 50 or maybe 100 or even 250 leaflets, which really means a lot of work. Which participants were more helpful? Again, the results showed that after listening to uplifting music, there was a higher willingness to help. After listening to uplifting music, participants agreed more often to distribute leaflets. There were even one or two participants who said, okay, I will distribute 200 or even 250 leaflets. Whereas in the annoying music condition, nobody was willing to distribute 200 or 250 leaflets.