A growing literature shows that music drives prosocial behavior (Clarke,
DeNora, & Vuoskoski, 2015). Why does this occur? We propose a novel
hypothesis: Evidence of others’ musicality may promote prosociality by
affecting judgments of others’ moral worth (where others fall on the
continuum of moral standing, see Goodwin, 2015). If so, simply knowing
about others’ musicality should affect moral decisions.
We test this in 3 experiments (total N=1000). Participants were introduced
to nine characters, and asked which of each pairing of characters felt more
wrong to harm (36 trials/participant). We manipulated musicality across two
matched character pairs: Two humans and two monkeys, with one of each pair
described as musical, and one not described as musical (matched for
length/style). Musical entities were reliably judged more wrong to harm
than their matched counterparts (ps<.01). This was the case for both animal
and human individuals (Exps. 1, 2) and across animal species (Exps. 2, 3).
Why would this occur? Participants saw the same set of
characters, but judged their musicality, intelligence, emotional or
physical sensitivity (Exp. 3). People judged musical entities more
intelligent and more sensitive (ps<.001), two factors known to drive moral
decisions (Goodwin, 2015). Musicality also independently contributed to
predicting wrongness-to-harm judgments (p=0.025).
Overall, we find that musicality is deeply interwoven with moral
decision-making. These findings dramatically expand the range of contexts
in which music can be expected to promote prosociality, and provide a novel
conception of music’s relation to the social mind.