The Efficacy of musical emotions provoked by Mozart’s music for the reconciliation of cognitive dissonance

Abstract

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.

Keywords: impact of music, cognitive dissonance, Mozart effect.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.25205/2658-4506-2017-10-2-154-166

Translation of the article: Masataka N., Perlovsky L. The efficacy of musical emotions provoked by Mozart’s music for the reconciliation of cognitive dissonance. Sci. Rep. 2, 694: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/srep00694 (2012).