How musicality changes moral consideration: People judge musical entities as more wrong to harm

How musicality changes moral consideration: People judge musical entities as more wrong to harm. Tanushree Agrawal, Joshua Rottman, and Adena Schachner. Psychology of Music, June 4, 2022, Volume 51, Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356221096507

Abstract: A growing literature shows that music increases prosocial behavior. Why does this occur? We propose a novel hypothesis, informed by moral psychology: evidence of others’ musicality may promote prosociality by leading us to judge musical individuals as having enhanced moral standing. This effect may be largely indirect, by increasing perceptions of how intelligent and emotionally sensitive musical individuals are. If so, simply knowing about others’ musicality should affect moral evaluations, such as wrongness to harm. Across four experiments (total N = 550), we found supportive evidence. Information that an animal or person had the capacity and motivation to engage with music led participants to judge these entities as more wrong to harm than matched neutral or non-musical counterparts. Similarly, knowing that a person was not musical made people judge them as less wrong to harm than neutral or musical counterparts. As predicted, musicality was positively associated with perceptions of capacities for emotionality and intelligence, and these broader factors partially mediated the relationship between musicality and wrongness to harm. These effects were not influenced by participants’ own musicality. Thus, non-moral attributes like musicality can impact moral consideration, carrying implications for social behavior and for interventions to promote prosociality.

General discussion

Across four experiments, we found that simply knowing that certain entities are capable of engaging with music leads participants to judge them as being more wrong to harm. When musicality was experimentally manipulated, participants judged it to be more painful for them to harm musical rather than control animal individuals (Exp. 1) and members of a musical versus control animal species (Exps. 2–4). This effect extended to judgments about humans. Participants judged it to be more painful for them to harm a highly musical individual, over a neutral baseline or control individual; and less painful to harm an individual with low musicality, below a neutral baseline (Exps. 2–4).

A major question in music psychology is why music promotes prosocial behavior, and when it can be expected to do so. Existing theoretical frameworks across both music psychology and moral psychology predict that first-person engagement with music should increase prosociality, through personally listening, playing, or dancing to music (e.g., Clarke et al., 2015). We find that third-person observations, even written evidence of others’ musicality, affect evaluations about wrongness to harm. These findings broaden the range of contexts in which music may be expected to impact social and moral behaviors.

Our findings further provide an explanation of why musicality shifts moral decisions: musicality provides broader evidence of inner mental life, including the capacity for emotional experience and intelligence (Exp. 4). Inferences about experience and intelligence act as mediators, linking evidence of musicality to increased wrongness to harm. Our data also speak against two alternative accounts. We find no evidence that similarity attraction explains these effects (Reis, 2007). Participants’ own level of musicality did not predict their tendencies to choose musical entities as more wrong to harm. Our data also cannot be parsimoniously explained by the idea that participants simply choose the more unusual, unique or surprising character as more wrong to harm. Non-musical people are relatively rare (Stewart, 2014), yet we find they are judged least wrong to harm among human characters (Exps. 3 and 4).

These findings suggest that beliefs in animal musicality may aid animal conservation efforts. Anecdotally, the movement to save the whales is believed to have gained momentum from whalesong research, with scientists taking evidence of musicality as evidence of wrongness to harm (e.g., biologist Roger Payne: “Do you make cat food out of composer-poets? I think that’s a crime”; May, 2014). This sentiment was echoed by laypeople and taken up as a banner issue by Greenpeace (May, 2014). The current findings provide a framework for explaining this phenomenon in terms of moral psychology.

Within the human population, people differ in their levels of musicality, with some people congenitally lacking the ability to perceive music (congenital amusia; Ayotte et al., 2002) or the ability to enjoy music (musical anhedonia; Loui et al., 2017; Mas-Herrero et al., 2014). In contrast, other clinical conditions like Williams syndrome are linked with high musicality (Levitin et al., 2004; Ng et al., 2013). Our findings suggest that people may judge it less wrong to harm individuals with amusia or musical anhedonia, and may be particularly compassionate toward individuals with conditions like Williams. Understanding these biases has the potential to inform our understanding of attitudes toward members of these clinical populations.

Is musicality unique in its impact on social and moral judgments? We do not expect musicality to be the only behavior that provides evidence of others’ mental and emotional abilities, or moral worth. However, we theorize that musicality is one of a small set of behaviors that provide this evidence easily, quickly, and convincingly. In ongoing work, we are testing the hypothesis that behaviors that demonstrate others’ ability to value activities or experiences for their own intrinsic worth (such as aesthetic judgments, e.g., appreciation of beauty in art, poetry, or nature; Fayn et al., 2015; McCrae & Sutin, 2009) provide particularly strong evidence of others’ emotional sensitivity, and thus their wrongness to harm. We contrast this with behaviors that are instrumental or extrinsically motivated (e.g., reaching a certain object or location), which we hypothesize may provide weaker evidence of emotional sensitivity. Aesthetic and moral judgments may be more deeply related than previously believed. Recent neuroimaging work shows similar neural activity and representations of aesthetic and moral judgments, suggesting similar cognitive processes in these domains (Heinzelmann et al., 2020; Tsukiura & Cabeza, 2011; Watson, 2013). We are testing our broader hypothesis regarding the role of aesthetic appreciation and intrinsic versus instrumental value in ongoing work.

The implications of human musicality for social attitudes are also likely to be more complex than is evident from the present studies. For example, the extent to which musicality is seen as a sign of intelligence may differ based on the genre of music (e.g., pop vs classical); or the extent to which the music is seen as sophisticated (e.g., Loomba, 2015). In the current experiments, we intentionally designed our vignettes to remain vague regarding the characters’ preferred genre of music and the mode of their engagement with music. Future work may explore the impact of various forms of engagement with different types of music on intergroup attitudes and related social judgments. Overall, we find that reasoning about others’ musicality is deeply interwoven with moral thought, providing a framework for understanding why music and dance, seemingly amoral aesthetic behaviors, have consequences for social and moral behaviors.