People May Be More Cooperative after Listening to Upbeat Music

Posted on September 2, 2016

The right mood music can influence how well people work together, a new management-oriented study suggests.

Many retail establishments carefully select the music they play in order to influence consumer behavior, such as encouraging shoppers to buy more, the authors write. But employees hear the same music and its effect on them hasn't been studied.

In the first of two studies, 78 participants were randomly divided into two groups: a “happy music” group that heard songs like “Yellow Submarine” by The Beatles and the theme from the television show “Happy Days,” and an “unhappy music” group that heard less familiar heavy metal songs like “Smokahontas” by Attack Attack!

The participants in each group used a computer application in which they played a sort of economics game with other unidentified participants in the same room, but players didn’t speak to one another.

In the application, each person was given 10 tokens corresponding to monetary value and was paired with two other people. Over 20 rounds of decision-making, each person was prompted to either keep their tokens or allocate them to a group pool which would be split among the participants at the end. Tokens in the group pool were valued 1.5 times as much as those held individually.

Consistently, people listening to happy music contributed more to the group pool.

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Category(s):Workplace Issues

Source material from Scientific American