Singer Debbie Friedman, who also died last weekend.

Given all the heated rhetoric surrounding the shooting in Tucson, we have to ask the question.  Do the words matter?  Is it possible to change people's behavior, even for a moment, by what you say and do?  And if so, can you use that power as a force for good?

One reason this juxtaposition of events struck me was that I had just finished reading a paper by Tobias Greitemeyer in the January, 2011 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.  In this paper, he pointed out that there is past evidence (some from his own lab) demonstrating that listening to music with violent lyrics can lead people to act more aggressively in a later laboratory task. 

In this set of studies, Greitemeyer was more interested in the effects of music with positive messages.  He compared the actions and thoughts of people who listened to songs with fairly neutral lyrics (like Octopus's Garden by the Beatles) to those who listened to songs with clearly positive or prosocial lyrics (like We Are The World by LiveAid). 

One study adapted a technique used by Brad Bushman and his colleagues to study aggressive behavior.  They told people that they were going to do a study involving writing and evaluating essays on a personal topic.  First, they wrote a brief essay.  They were then given an essay to evaluate by another participant who they were told was sitting in the room next door (in fact there was no other participant).  They were also told their essay was brought to that participant to evaluate.  Soon afterward, the participant's essay was returned with the comment that the essay was boring.  This feedback tends to get people frustrated and to make them angry with the other participant.

After this essay task, participants listened either to music with uplifting lyrics or to music with neutral lyrics.  After listening to the music, participants filled out some scales measuring their attitudes toward violence and feelings of hostility.

Next, participants were asked to help out with a blind taste test that was being conducted.  They were told that the other participant (who had graded their essay) was going to taste test a chili sauce.  The experimenter knew that the participant hated very spicy foods, but needed someone to select which of two sauces the participant would taste, and how much of it they would get.  One of the sauces was sweet, and the other was hot and spicy.  The amount of the hot sauce that participants selected was taken as a measure of aggression toward this other person.

Listening to uplifting music led to lower feelings of hostility and a less positive attitude toward violence than listening to neutral music.  In addition, people who listened to positive music were less likely to give hot chili sauce to the person who had rated their essay as boring than the people who listened to neutral music.  That is, the positive music made people less act less aggressively toward someone else.

It is a long way from giving a little hot sauce to someone to committing a terrible act of violence.  But results like these make clear that we can influence people's daily behavior through our actions and our words.  Perhaps most importantly, our actions, our words, and our music can be a force that makes the people around us act more positively.

In the wake of any tragedy, it is easy to point fingers, but hard to point the way toward making life better in the future.  Perhaps we can all take a lesson from Debbie Friedman, then, and find ways to provide positive messages to those around us. 

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