Got another great prosocial persuasion play for you. Get your boombox, load it up with Magic Music, then ask for help. And, you'll get it. Here's how.
Tobias Greitemeyer randomly assigned participants in four experiments to listen to either neutral songs (Octopus's Garden by the Beatles; Vertigo by U2) or prosocial songs (Help! by the Beatles; Feed the World by U2), as part of a "marketing study." After that study was "completed," Greitemeyer changed the scene so that participants thought they were free and doing what they wanted. Then Greitemeyer did the real test. Consider these situations.
1. A woman walks into the room and accidently knocks over a container of pencils, spilling 20 on the floor by the participant. She mutters under her breath and waits 5 seconds to see if the participant will help.
2. A confederate for the study asks the participant to volunteer for another experiment by signing up and choosing how long they could volunteer.
3. A confederate asks the participants if they'd be willing to volunteer for charitable actions, then gives a list of actions to select.
4. The participant plays a money game that allows you to leave your winnings for the next player. It's only pennies.
Interestingly, in each of the four experiments Greitemeyer found that people who had listened to "helpful" music compared to "neutral" music were always more likely to help on the following "unrelated" task.
1. 5.6 pencils versus 1.2 pencils for a windowpane of 20/80.
2. 68% volunteers versus 28% for a windowpane of 30/70.
3. 4.3 willing score versus 3.3 for a windowpane of 25/75.
4. 7 coins left versus 5.3 for a windowpane of 30/70.
Consider what we've got here. Expose people to prosocial music with lyrics that describe people helping other people - not happy music with a great beat; it's the lyrics. Then in the immediate situation make a request or a play for assistance, help pick up a mess, volunteer, make a small contribution. And, you will get large effect size responses.
Greitemeyer did not run a Full Monte ELM study here with a manipulation of WATTage and a condition with Argument quality, so to interpret this we have to make some inferences.
This looks like an obvious Peripheral Route play with a Low WATT processor following Cues to immediate, simple action. It is entirely consistent with the CLARCCS Cue of Liking (When you like the source, do what they ask). The music generates positive affect with a particular orientation of helpfulness and that Cue drives action. And the comparison with the neutral music group tells us that the helping situation was not overwhelming. The effect sizes alone are so large that clearly the neutral condition people were never falling over themselves to be nice.
It is also important to note that Greitemeyer made sure that the participants heard the music. He didn't play it merely as background, but rather made the participants listen to it as part of the marketing cover story, for example. If you were to set up a booth with a loop of prosocial songs as busy people walked by, the effect would likely be much smaller.
This is a nice study that makes a good contribution the the prosocial research literature and also provides an excellent and practical Cue.
