On the Impact of Music on Decision Making in Cooperative Tasks

Numerous studies have demonstrated that mood affects emotional and cognitive processing. Previous work has established that music-induced mood can measurably alter people's behavior in different contexts. However, the nature of how decision-making is affected by music in social settings hasn't been sufficiently explored. The goal of this study is to examine which aspects of people's decision making in inter-social tasks are affected when exposed to music. For this purpose, we devised an experiment in which people drove a simulated car through an intersection while listening to music. The intersection was not empty, as another simulated vehicle, controlled autonomously, was also crossing the intersection in a different direction. Our results indicate that music indeed alters people's behavior with respect to this social task. To further understand the correspondence between auditory features and decision making, we have also studied how individual aspects of music affected response patterns.