Hosch 1
Julia Hosch
Professor Poudrier
Cognition of Musical Rhythm
11 December 2013
The Power of Music in Decision-Making Situations
1. Introduction
In the field of music cognition research, there exists an expansive literature about how music impacts emotion. A wide variety of perspectives that could possibly affect a listener’s emotions such as rhythm, tempo, tone quality, and genre have already been explored(Schellenberg, Krysciak, & Campbell, 2000; Webster & Weir, 2005).Even intuitively, it seems more than reasonable that hearing music can impact how we feel and express ourselves. Through these lenses of research, it has become apparent that the study of the effects of music on emotion has earned a place in the field of human psychology.
By the same token, gone are the days that we might consider emotion to be an invalid component of decision-making that should be quashed and left at the door in reasonable debate. Rather, our emotions are our instinctual bias of telling us what is “right” or “wrong,” and are indicators of our automatic judgments that me make, often before we are conscious that we’ve made them (Libet, Gleason, Wright, & Pearl, 1983). Emotions play a greater role in our decision-making than we often realize. The point, then, of research in emotion and decision-making is not to prove that emotion impacts judgment, but to inform the general public on how to make better choices. “Informed” in this case would not necessarily mean informed of product choices or pros and cons of a situation, but instead informed about the trends and instincts of one’s own mind in given situations with given influences, both internal and environmental.
Imagine a Venn diagram with three major cirlces of emotion, music, and decision-making fields. From three fields, cross-sections of interdisciplinary research emerge. Emotion and music overlap to form music perception and cognition, and emotion and decision-making form the field of behavioral neuroscience, commonly called behavioral economics. Decision-making and music intersect in music and marketing studies. (Although it is certainly plausible that the emotion of customers is definitely a part of this research, I am excluding it from the intersection with emotion becausein the realm of advertising, emotion is not the main research focus, only the financial implications of decisions made after priming by music. In this study, I hope to explore music’s power to induce emotion andhow music-induced emotion impacted by music can, in turn, impact economic decisions.
Figure 1: Venn diagram of the intersections of emotion, decision-making, and music cognition research. The major fields of emotion, music, and decision-making are the outer and most prominent circles, while the interdisciplinary fields of perception and cognition of rhythm; behavioral economics; and music and marketing research are intersections of these fields. Music and marketing research is probably the closest to the intersection point of all three fields, but because the focus of this research is the direct impact on consumer sales rather than development of psychology, I am excluding it from the emotional circle. This study focuses on the intersection of all three fields, integrating emotion studies into both decision-making and music.
2. Previous research in Music and Emotion
2.1Music and Emotion: Felt Emotion versus Perceived Emotion
The main questions asked in the field of music psychology center around the debate on whether a listener perceives emotion in music through a process of decoding the emotions expressed by a particular combination of musical features, or whether listening to a musical work causes the listener toexperience a particular emotion. The first, the cognitivist position, states that listeners can perceive emotions expressed in the music without necessarily feeling those emotions (Hodges, 2011). Arguments for this theory include the widespread ability, regardless of technical talent or even neurotypical development, to discern certain basic emotional traits of music. In one example, Peretz and Gagnon (1999) describe a woman with right and left temporal lobe lesions unable to recognize familiar melodies, butable to discriminate music on the basis of the emotion conveyed. This “affective blindness” demonstrates that even though the woman was unable to actually feel the emotion of the music, she could discern it well enough to use it as her primary mode of definition between pieces. Finally, one of the strongest arguments for this theory is recent research suggesting that music induces emotions in only 55-65 percent of recent listening experiences (Juslin, Liljestrom, Vastfjall, & Lundqvist, 2010). Because it is unlikely that close to 35-45% of all musical experiences are entirely devoid of all emotion whatsoever, it seems plausible that there must be some attention necessary to create an induced emotion.
The emotivist position argues that listeners actually do feel real emotions that are induced by music, and that perceived emotions and felt emotions can be exactly the same. Goldstein (1980) conducted a survey of intense emotional experiences, and observed that shudders, tingling sensations, chills, and other physical responses to emotion are also found in response to music. Sloboda (1991) also developed a list of physical reactions that an emotional experience might induce, such as shivers, laughter, tears, racing heart, and sweating. When he asked participants to rank the frequency of these reactions in their experiences listening to music, he found that almost all participants reported feeling these reactions, especially shivers down the spine.Both studies show significant support for the emotivist theory because of the high correlation and similarity between physical reactions to music and physical reactions widely seen in emotional situations.
More recently, a third argument has arisen due to the fact thatit is possible to have both a perception of an emotion and the feeling of the actual emotion in the same listener, even at different times in the same piece. This theory, suggested by Konecni (2005), is called the Aesthetic Trinity Theory, or ATT, and states that profound responses to music involve 1) awe, 2) being moved, and 3) thrills. Another study on this idea of the importance of “chills” in music as a physical response was designed by JaakPanksepp, who hypothesized that because “feelings of sadness typically arise from the severance of established social bonds, there may exist basic neurochemical similarities between the chilling emotions evoked by music and those engendered by social loss.” Research on this response was intended to clarify how music interacts with a specific emotional process of the normal human brain (Panksepp, 1995). Not a great deal of research has been devoted to this theory besides this previous work on chills. However, the theorydoes suggest that the cognitivist and emotivist positions alone might not explain all of the methods necessary to demonstrate differences between or existence of felt and perceived emotion in music; there may be differences that arise from very specific emotions and very specific physical responses, such as sadness and chills or goosebumps.
3. Previous Research in the fields of Emotion and Economics
3.1. Immediate/Integral Emotions and Expected Emotions
The consequentialist theory of economics is a prominent economic theory that “assumes that decision makers choose between alternative courses of action by assessing the desirability and likelihood of their consequences and integrating this information through some type of expectation-based calculus” (Rick & Lowenstein, 2008). In short, emotions are considered a quantity that could be factored into this ‘calculus’ and determined to be a helpful or hurtful factor.
The problem with this theory is that “emotion” is far too broad concept to be mathematically calculated in its entirety. To help split up the idea of all human emotional capacity, Lowenstein created two types of emotions: expected and integral/immediate (Lowenstein et al. 2001; Lowenstein & Lerner 2003). Expected emotions are those that one predicts that he or she will feel after an emotional event, either negative or positive. Often, these predictions of future emotional states are wildly overestimated; people predict that they will be joyful or hurt far longer and far more than they actually feel after the predicted event actually arrives. In one particularly illustrative study, lottery winners were asked to track their daily “happiness levels” and guess their happiness levels after a year based on their windfalls. A year later, those lottery winners reported a significantly lower happiness level as the year before, even though they had anticipated feeling overjoyed and living in luxury for years. (Brickman, Coates, & Janoff-Bulman, 1978).
Through studies like these, psychology has taught us that we are not accurate predictors of our own minds’ feelings in any moment other than the present, and expected emotions weigh heavily in our decision-making abilities.
Immediate emotions, or integral emotions, are entirely different both in nature and their prevalence in psychology studies. Like expected emotions, they arise from thinking about the future consequences of one’s choice. However, unlike expected emotions, they arise at the moment of choice. Therefore, often they can be influenced by “dispositional or situational sources” such as a person’s mood at that particular moment of the decision, the sound of the television playing in the background, or the crying of a baby heard while the decision-maker is on the telephone. These are significantly harder to study because they are difficult to isolate: mood is difficult to control for everyone in walk-in psychology studies, and there are simply two many factors to control in any given environment to know what conditions will be the most influential on a given situation, especially if all the environmental distractions are fairly small (Hodges, 2011).
All that said, there have been some studies based on integral emotion, even with the research constraints. One of the most interesting studies of decision-making involving integral emotion was completed by Hirshliefer and Shumway, who found that during years when it was particularly sunny as opposed to cloudy, people were more willing to take risks with their economic stocks. While citizens thought that this willingness to risk was based on the upward nature of the market, actually, the induced emotion given by the presence of sunshine was a mood inducer that gave citizens confidence to undergo riskier business transactions for greater potential payoff (Hirshliefer and Shumway, 2007).
This study shows that integral emotions do have an effect on decisions, but why? One theory presented is that integral emotions use somatic “tagging.” Somatic markers are affective ‘tags’ attached to sensory images, ‘marking’ each image with an emotional association These marks reduce the number of options under consideration, making decision-making process more efficient, and decision-making to happen automatically without spending brain energy to make a decision (Thompson, 2009).
In sum, these two types of emotion, expected, and integral, change the way that we perceive our own emotions, while we still often believe that we are being highly rational. The crucial difference between the two lies in when they are experienced: the “key feature of expected emotions is that they are experienced when the outcomes of a decision materialize, but not at the moment of choice; at the moment of choice, they are only cognitions about future emotions” (Rick & Lowenstein, 2008). In this study, I will focus primarily on integral emotions because these immediate responses are generated, or at least perceived by the hearing of music.
3.2. Economic Game Theory
There are two “games” heavily studied in the field of behavioral economics. Both illustrate the moral leanings of participants, and both show how different situational variables can change an outcome drastically. The first game is the “Ultimatum game.” In the basic format of this game, there are two players. One player has a set amount of capital, and can choose to give the other player an arbitrary amount of that capital. If the other player accepts the amount that he or she is given, both players keep their new amounts of capital. If the other player rejects, then both of the players lose their capital. Although in any scenario, both players logically make money from the experience, the second player often becomes indignant and rejects the sum if it appears to be too small. Because of this, it would seem evident that participants would learn very quickly that cooperating is the best method. Often this is the case; however, variations on this experiment show that with variables such as an audience present for the experiment; a primed mindset of what has been given or received in previous trials; or a vision of the other player; people have been known to change the value amounts given (Pinker, 1997).
The other is the Dictator game. In this game, the first player (the “dictator”) has a set amount of capita. He or she can choose whether to give any amount to the other player. The second player has no say in the experiment. Although this task might seem obvious, the results of the game and amounts given by the dictator depend on many factors, just like the Ultimatum game. Some of these variables are the same, such as whether an audience is present or whether the Dictator feels as though he or she is being watched. There are also variables specific to this game, such as whether the recipient has been made known to the giver, and if so, if the giver feels as though the recipient is somehow “morally worthy” of the gift. In all of these occasions, givers have been known to increase or decrease their giving amounts based on these external factors (Pinker, 1997).
Both of these games have shown valuable insights into economic factors dealing with emotion, both social and antisocial.
IV. Music and Marketing Research
The field of music and marketing research predominantly focuses on how to best predict the actions of a consumer with priming by the advertiser. Music has become integral to successful advertising, both in direct and indirect ways.
An example of a direct music to consumer advertisement might be the radio jingle concept. The impact of this type of advertising often is not immediate; people do not necessarily immediately act on the commercials that they see on television and run to the store to purchase the item. Therefore, the key niche of effective advertising is to develop a tag or “hook” that will draw in the customer when he or she next has the opportunity to act on the suggestion of the advertisement. Radio jingles work like this: although listening to the radio in the car might not put a person in the position to buy a certain brand of milk, when the listener is next in the grocery store and sees the brand, the jingle may come to mind.
The indirect method of music and advertising has no delay between the advertisement and the opportunity of purchase. One highly studied aspect of music’s impact on marketing is the effect of volume on a customer’s actions. Smith and Curnow found that louder and faster music overall sells more of products, but that slower, more soothing music tends to allow customers to make decisions more slowly so that they are happier about their purchases. Customers happy with their purchases are more likely to come back, and the stores make more revenue over longer periods of time. In another example of the impact of music on direct purchasing power in a store, a study on French and German music played on alternating days in a wine section of a grocery store found that people overwhelmingly tended to purchase the type of wine that matched the nationality of the music, whether they recognized that the music was impacting their purchasing decisions or not (Heargraves & North, 1999).
These examples are only two of an entirely full literature of music and marketing research focusing on product placement and musical factors that change customer decisions (such as tempo, key, and even nationality of origin.) Until this point, however, researchers have focused primarily on how these studies can best move capital towards the purchasing of products, and not on furthering the studies on how exactly music impacts the emotions during the decisions made. I hope to look at the next study through this interdisciplinary angle.
5. Case Study
5.1 Background
Professor Dan Ariely at the Duke Fuqua School of Business and Professor Eduardo Andrade from University of California wrote a research paper discussing how people’s “fleeting incidental emotions” can become a basis for future decisions. If a decision is made by an individual in a certain emotional state, he or she will tend to repeat the same decisions made in the same contexts even if they no longer feel the emotion that they did in the previous decision. In summary, “given that people often do not realize they are being influenced by the incidental emotional state, decisions based on a fleeting incidental emotion can become the basis for future decisions and hence outlive the original cause of the behavior (i.e., the emotion itself)” (Andrade & Ariely, 2009).