Normally, crazy useless studies tend to come from Chinese universities, but this one came from the RWTH in Aachen, Germany, proving once and for all that Germans do have a sense of humour…
Wolfgang Breuer and Sophia Marie von Banhans (née Schmidt) wanted to know whether one can induce prosocial emotions in people with the help of music and, if so, if that had any effect on their investment decisions. Why? Because reasons.
So, they went along and recruited 204 volunteers for an experiment that the volunteers could do at home on their own computers. Half the volunteers were exposed to music (three English-language songs and one German-language song) with prosocial lyrics. The other half were exposed to four songs with neutral lyrics.
In case you are wondering, the four prosocial songs were ‘Heal the World’ by Michael Jackson, ‘We are the World’ by USA for Africa, ‘Ein bisschen Frieden’ by Nicole, and ‘Love Generation’ by Bob Sinclair.
Now, I don’t know about your taste in music, but the most prosocial thing you can do with any of these songs is put them on mute so as not to torture the people around you any longer.
Compare this to the ‘neutral songs’ which were ‘On the Line’ by Michael Jackson, ‘Englishman in New York’ by Sting, ‘Spiel um Deine Seele’ by Peter Maffay, and ‘Rock this Party’ by Bob Sinclair.
At least it’s got one good song in there from Sting, but I apologise for having exposed my readers to the other three.
In any case, the results were clear. People who listened to prosocial songs invested more money into a hypothetical green stock investment than people who listened to neutral songs. Or maybe they just paid more in order to make the experiment stop sooner.
You may laugh at my suggestion, but when measuring empathy, the research found that people who have more empathy invest more in green stocks. But people who have more empathy and then listen to the prosocial music invest less in green stocks.
Which brings me to the obvious musical coda to this post:
