From: William Benzon (bbenzon@mindspring.com)
Date: Mon 28 Feb 2005 - 18:35:08 GMT
------ Forwarded Message
From: "Nicholas Bannan" <n.j.c.bannan@reading.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:53:59 -0000
To: "Psymus@Sempre.Org.Uk" <psymus@sempre.org.uk>
Subject: [Psymus] Mozart Effect
Stanford Report, February 2, 2005
Dubious 'Mozart Effect' remains music to many Americans' ears
BY MARINA KRAKOVSKY
Scientists have discredited claims that listening to classical music
enhances intelligence, yet this so-called "Mozart Effect" has actually
exploded in popularity over the years.
So says Chip Heath, an associate professor of organizational behavior who
has systematically tracked the evolution of this scientific legend. What's
more, Heath and his colleague, Swiss psychologist Adrian Bangerter, found
that the Mozart Effect received the most newspaper mentions in those U.S.
states with the weakest educational systems‹giving tentative support to the
previously untested notion that rumors and legends grow in response to
public anxiety.
"When we traced the Mozart Effect back to the source [the 1993 Nature
journal report titled 'Music and Spatial Task Performance'], we found this
idea achieved astounding success," says Heath. The researchers found far
more newspaper articles about that study than about any other Nature report
published around the same time. And as the finding spread through lay
culture over the years, it got watered down and grossly distorted. "People
were less and less likely to talk about the Mozart Effect in the context of
college students who were the participants in the original study, and they
were more likely to talk about it with respect to babies‹even though there's
no scientific research linking music and intelligence in infants," says
Heath, who analyzed hundreds of relevant newspaper articles published
between 1993 and 2001.
Not only had babies never been studied, but the original 1993 experiment had
found only a modest and temporary IQ increase in college students performing
a specific kind of task while listening to a Mozart sonata. And even that
finding was proved suspect after a 1999 review showed that over a dozen
subsequent studies failed to verify the 1993 result. While many newspapers
did report this blow to the Mozart Effect, the legend continued to
spread‹overgeneralizations and all. For example, Heath cites a 2001 article
in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that refers to "numerous studies on the
Mozart Effect and how it helps elementary students, high school students,
and even infants increase mental performance." In truth, none of these
groups had been studied, says Heath.
So why did the Mozart Effect take such a powerful hold in popular culture,
particularly in reference to babies and children? Heath and Bangerter
surmised that the purported effect tapped into a particularly American
anxiety about early childhood education. (Bangerter, who was doing research
in Stanford's psychology department during the study, had been struck by
Americans' obsession with their kids' education. For example, he saw that a
preschool near the Stanford campus had the purposeful name "Knowledge
Beginnings," whereas a preschool near a university in Switzerland was called
"Vanilla-Strawberry." The latter made no lofty claims about its educational
goals.) Concern about education was so great, in fact, that several U.S.
states actually passed laws requiring state-subsidized childcare centers to
play classical music or giving all new mothers a classical music CD in the
hospital.
To test their hypothesis that the legend of the Mozart Effect grew in
response to anxiety about children's education, Heath and Bangerter compared
different U.S. states' levels of media interest in the Mozart Effect with
each state's educational problems (as measured by test scores and teacher
salaries). Sure enough, they found that in states with the most problematic
educational systems (such as Georgia and Florida), newspapers gave the most
coverage to the Mozart Effect.
"Problems attract solutions," explains Heath, and people grappling with
complex problems tend to grasp for solutions, even ones that aren't
necessarily credible. "They can be highly distorted, bogus things like the
Mozart Effect," says Heath, adding that similar patterns occur in our
culture's fixation on fad diets and facile business frameworks.
Heath's analysis also found that spikes in media interest generally
corresponded to events outside of science‹particularly state legislation and
two pop psychology books, The Mozart Effect and The Mozart Effect for
Children.
Lest Heath's own findings spawn overgeneralizations, he's quick to point out
that the Mozart Effect is a particular type of legend. "The Mozart Effect
points out a solution, whereas urban legends point out a problem." The
prevailing but untested thinking about urban legends holds that they spread
by tapping into public anxiety. But Heath says that even if the Mozart
Effect succeeded by suggesting a solution to an anxiety, it's not clear why
legends that create anxiety would spread. Why, for example, would people
circulate stories about rat meat in KFC meals or about the perils of
flashing your headlights at motorists driving without their lights on. "I'm
still skeptical about the anxiety approach to urban legends," he cautions.
The anxiety explanation seems simple and convenient on the surface, but as
the history of the Mozart Effect shows, a convenient answer may well be
completely false. As Heath puts it, "We've got to look for a realistic way
out instead of an easy way out."
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