2386 - 11 - 1 - 4103 “ Experimental studies on the efficiency of musical emotions for the reconciliation of conceptual dissonances ”

Debates on the origin and function of music have a long history. While some scientists argue that music itself plays no adaptive role in human evolution, others suggest that music clearly has an evolutionary role, and point to music’s universality. A recent hypothesis suggested that a fundamental function of music has been to help mitigating cognitive dissonance, which is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions simultaneously It usually leads to devaluation of conflicting knowledge. Here we provide experimental confirmation of this hypothesis using a classical paradigm known to create cognitive dissonance. Results of our experiment reveal that the exposure to Mozart’s music exerted a strongly positive influence upon the performance of young children and served as basis by which they were enabled to reconcile the cognitive dissonance. Introduction: The effect of listening to Mozart’s music on spatial reasoning has been investigated extensively since 1993. Moreover, in 2008, Nature published a series of essays on music. The authors agreed that music is a cross-cultural universal, still “no one... has yet been able to answer the fundamental question: why does music have such power over us?”. Here we provide experimental demonstration that music helps tolerating cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is “a discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions” simultaneously. People prefer to avoid this discomfort and usually they do it by devaluation of conflicting knowledge. A recent hypothesis, experimentally validated here, suggested that music can help mitigating cognitive dissonance and keeping conflicting knowledge in mind. Ancient Greeks knew that people did not like the dissonance and tend to resolve it by devaluing a conflicting cognition. In the Aesop’s fable, when a fox sees high-hanging grapes, his desire to eat grapes and inability to reach them are in conflict. The fox overcomes this cognitive dissonance by deciding that the grapes are sour and not worth eating. Since the 1950s cognitive dissonance became a widely and well intensively studied area of psychology. It is known that tolerating cognitive dissonance is difficult, and people often make irrational decisions to avoid it. In the present study, cognitive dissonance was experimentally created in 4-year-old children using a well-established method (the induced-compliance paradigm). According to the previous research, similar cognitive dissonance as adults can be confirmed in children as young as 4-year-olds, using this method. The experiment was Report Documentation Page Form Approved