25 research outputs found
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The Impact of Musicality and Aesthetic Appreciation on Social Judgments
Making spontaneous judgments about new people is a fundamental requirement of our social world. People regularly assess how prosocially others will behave in order to guide their interpersonal interactions, and use observations about others’ behaviors to make such trait inferences. Work from music psychology shows that aesthetic activities like music have positive social effects and are associated with prosocial traits, suggesting that observing these behaviors may also dramatically impact interpersonal trait inferences. In this thesis, I explore whether this is the case, and ask if evaluations of others’ sociomoral traits are impacted by their capacities for musicality and aesthetic appreciation. In Chapter 1, I demonstrate that simply knowing about others’ musicality impacts moral evaluations about them. Learning that a person or animal is musical leads participants to judge them as more morally wrong to harm than matched neutral or non-musical characters, irrespective of participants’ own musicality. In Chapter 2, I explore what drives this surprising effect. I show that the impact of musicality on harm judgments is driven by enhanced perceptions of musical individuals’ mental traits, such as their intelligence, emotionality, and ability to experience physical sensations like pain and hunger. In Chapter 3, I show that music is not unique in its impact on interpersonal judgments, and provide evidence that others’ capacity for broader aesthetic appreciation is a crucial underlying factor for judgments of sociomoral traits. I find that individuals doing an activity because they value its intrinsic, aesthetic beauty (whether listening to music, painting, eating, exercising, being in nature, or doing math) are judged as more emotionally sensitive, more compassionate, and less selfish/manipulative towards others, compared to individuals doing the same activity to achieve some external functional goal. Finally, in the last chapter, I apply my findings to a pressing real-world problem: prejudice against marginalized populations. I test the effectiveness of a music-based intervention, involving learning about the musicality of a marginalized individual (e.g., a person experiencing incarceration), in reducing negative social attitudes towards them.
Overall, I highlight that seemingly irrelevant attributes, like musicality and aesthetic engagement, impact interpersonal and moral consideration, carrying implications for social behavior and for interventions to promote real-world prosociality
Aesthetic Motivation Impacts Judgments of Others’ Prosociality and Mental Life
The ability to infer others’ prosocial vs. antisocial behavioral tendencies from minimal information is core to social reasoning. Aesthetic motivation (the value or appreciation of aesthetic beauty) is linked with prosocial tendencies, raising the question of whether this factor is used in interpersonal reasoning and trait attribution. We propose and test a model of this reasoning, predicting that evidence of others’ aesthetic motivations should impact judgments of others’ prosocial (and antisocial) tendencies by signaling a heightened capacity for emotional experience. In a series of four pre-registered experiments (total N=1440), participants saw pairs of characters (as photos/vignettes), and judged which in each pair showed more of a trait of interest. Distractor items prevented participants from guessing the hypothesis. For one critical pair of characters, both characters performed the same activity (music listening, painting, cooking, exercising, being in nature, doing math), but one was motivated by the activities’ aesthetic value, and the other by its functional value. Across all activities, participants robustly chose aesthetically-motivated characters as more likely to behave compassionately (Exp. 1; 3), less likely to behave selfishly/manipulatively (Exp. 1; 3), and as more emotionally sensitive, but not more intelligent (Exp. 2; 3; 4). Emotional sensitivity best predicted compassionate behavior judgements (Exp. 3). Aesthetically-motivated characters were not reliably chosen as more helpful; intelligence best predicted helpfulness judgements (Exp. 4). Evidence of aesthetic motivation conveys important social information about others, impacting fundamental interpersonal judgments about others’ mental life and social behavior
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Hearing water temperature: Characterizing the development of nuanced perception of sound sources.
Without conscious thought, listeners link events in the world to sounds they hear. We study one surprising example: Adults can judge the temperature of water simply from hearing it being poured. We test the development of the ability to hear water temperature, with the goal of informing developmental theories regarding the origins and cognitive bases of nuanced sound source judgments. We first confirmed that adults accurately distinguished the sounds of hot and cold water (pre-registered Experiments. 1, 2; total N = 384), even though many were unaware or uncertain of this ability. By contrast, children showed protracted development of this skill over the course of middle childhood (Experiments. 2, 3; total N = 178). In spite of accurately identifying other sounds and hot/cold images, older children (7-11 years) but not younger children (3-6 years) reliably distinguished the sounds of hot and cold water. Accuracy increased with age; 11-year old's performance was similar to adults. Adults also showed individual differences in accuracy that were predicted by their amount of prior relevant experience (Experiment 1). Experience may similarly play a role in children's performance; differences in auditory sensitivity and multimodal integration may also contribute to young children's failures. The ability to hear water temperature develops slowly over childhood, such that nuanced auditory information that is easily and quickly accessible to adults is not available to guide young children's behavior. HIGHLIGHTS: Adults can make nuanced judgments from sound, including accurately judging the temperature of water from the sound of it being poured. Children showed protracted development of this skill over the course of middle childhood, such that 7-11-year-olds reliably succeeded while 3-6-year-olds performed at chance. Developmental changes may be due to experience (adults with greater relevant experience showed higher accuracy) and the development of multimodal integration and auditory sensitivity. Young children may not detect subtle auditory information that adults easily perceive
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People think of others as more prosocial when they are motivated by aesthetic goals vs. instrumental goals
People expect others to take efficient paths toward goals. Inefficiency changes how we categorize actions, leading us to see actions as play (Chu & Schulz, 2020), or as movements performed for their own intrinsic value (Schachner & Carey, 2013). Here we find that performing actions for their own value (e.g., aesthetic value), versus for instrumental purposes, provides social information about others. In a pre-registered experiment (N=360), participants judged which character in a pair was more compassionate, or more selfish/manipulative. For one key pair (among distractors), both characters performed the same activity (music, painting, eating, exercising, math, being in nature), and we manipulated why: Either for its own aesthetic value, or as a means-to-an-end (instrumental value). Across all activities, aesthetically-motivated characters were judged as more compassionate and less selfish/manipulative than instrumentally-motivated characters (p’s<0.01). Aesthetically-motivated behavior may signal others’ emotionality moreso than instrumentally-motivated activities, driving inferences about prosociality
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Aesthetic Motivation Impacts Judgments of Others’ Prosociality and Mental Life
The ability to infer others' prosocial vs. antisocial behavioral tendencies from minimal information is core to social reasoning. Aesthetic motivation (the value or appreciation of aesthetic beauty) is linked with prosocial tendencies, raising the question of whether this factor is used in interpersonal reasoning and in the attribution of mental capacities. We propose and test a model of this reasoning, predicting that evidence of others' aesthetic motivations should impact judgments of others' prosocial (and antisocial) tendencies by signaling a heightened capacity for emotional experience. In a series of four pre-registered experiments (total N = 1440), participants saw pairs of characters (as photos/vignettes), and judged which in each pair showed more of a mental capacity of interest. Distractor items prevented participants from guessing the hypothesis. For one critical pair of characters, both characters performed the same activity (music listening, painting, cooking, exercising, being in nature, doing math), but one was motivated by the activities' aesthetic value, and the other by its functional value. Across all activities, participants robustly chose aesthetically-motivated characters as more likely to behave compassionately (Exp. 1; 3), less likely to behave selfishly/manipulatively (Exp. 1; 3), and as more emotionally sensitive, but not more intelligent (Exp. 2; 3; 4). Emotional sensitivity best predicted compassionate behavior judgements (Exp. 3). Aesthetically-motivated characters were not reliably chosen as more helpful; intelligence best predicted helpfulness judgements (Exp. 4). Evidence of aesthetic motivation conveys important social information about others, impacting fundamental interpersonal judgments about others' mental life and social behavior