The Song Exploder Effect

Anderson, Marissa 2020 Psychology Thesis Title: The Song Exploder Effect: When Learning Leads to Love: Advisor: Kenneth Savitsky Advisor is Co-author/Adviser Restricted Data Used: None of the above Second Advisor: Release: release now Authenticated User Access (does not apply to released theses): Contains Copyrighted Material: No THE SONG EXPLODER EFFECT: WHEN LEARNING LEADS TO LOVE By MARISSA ANDERSON Kenneth Savitsky, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Psychology WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts May 28, 2020 THE SONG EXPLODER EFFECT 1 Abstract There is variability in people’s views about how learning information about an aesthetic experience will affect liking. Does insider information enhance an aesthetic experience listening to a song, or does it spoil everything? I examine this issue in four studies. In Studies 1 and 2, I explore individuals’ intuitions about whether insider-information enhances or diminishes their aesthetic experience. In Studies 3 and 4, I put the question to experimental test by manipulating whether or not participants listen to an episode of Song Exploder and then assessing their liking for the song (as well as their intuitions about how the podcast has affected their enjoyment). I found that people’s intuitions lead them to believe that they would prefer not to learn behind-the-scenes information about a song in order to maximize their enjoyment. In reality, the lab studies suggest that listening to an episode of Song Exploder increased enjoyment of listening to the song. The mechanism behind this “Song Exploder effect” was found to be a feeling of social connection that the listener felt with the artist. THE SONG EXPLODER EFFECT 2 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Kenneth Savitsky. I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to take multiple courses with you in my time at Williams. Through working as a research assistant in your lab I learned an incredible amount about research in the field of psychology and learned how rewarding it is to commit yourself to a project such as a thesis. Thank you for sparking my interest in social psychology and for your constant support, guidance, and excitement that made my project a success. Thank you to Professor Jeremy Cone for being my second reader. Your genuine interest in my project was clear and I really appreciate you taking the time to check in throughout the semester and help with many decisions along the way. Thank you to all the professors in the Psychology department at Williams who helped me to recruit participants for my studies. By offering extra credit in your classes and sharing your class rosters I was able to reach my sample size goals. Lastly, I would like to thank my family, friends, and teammates. I could not have completed this project without your support and encouragement. I really appreciate your willingness to listen to any song or podcast that I needed advice with and your participation and help with distributing my many surveys. Thank you for sticking with me through it all. THE SONG EXPLODER EFFECT 3 Imagine that before you watch a movie, you have an opportunity to learn behind-the-scenes information about it—how the script was written and rewritten by a team of screenwriters, how scenes were lit and cameras were placed, how the special effects were created, and even how it ends. Or imagine that before you hear a new song, you have an opportunity to learn all about it—how the songwriter came up with the idea and wrote the music, how each musician was recorded in the studio, and how a recording engineer mixed the different parts into a finished song. Would you want to know this information and how would knowing it affect your enjoyment of the film or song? Does insider information enhance an aesthetic experience, or does it spoil everything? These are the questions I address in my research. Whether to seek or avoid information is a question many people wrestle with in their everyday lives (Sweeny, Melnyk, Miller, & Shepperd, 2010). Knowing information can aid in decision making, improve the accuracy of predictions, relieve troubling uncertainty, and help individuals in many ways (Dawson, Savitsky, & Dunning, 2006; Dunning, 1995). Indeed, as Sir Francis Bacon observed, “knowledge is power.” And yet, many people seem to agree that “ignorance is bliss,” as Thomas Gray wrote in his poem “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” Especially when it comes to how it may affect their aesthetic experience, many people opt to avoid information, believing that knowing too much can decrease enjoyment because it takes away from the sweet mysteries of life. Consistent with this view, people sometimes go to great lengths to avoid learning too much about the things they enjoy prior to experiencing them—for example, avoiding information about the ending of a favorite movie or TV series by avoiding online discussions or social THE SONG EXPLODER EFFECT 4 situations that might cause them to learn “spoilers” (Johnson & Rosenbaum, 2018). Knowing the ending or too many behind-the-scenes details would prevent them from having a pure, unadulterated experience, and, they fear, would thus rob them of the full aesthetic experience. In the opening lines of a movie review on NPR about Parasite Justin Chang explained, “I was fortunate enough to go into Parasite knowing almost nothing about it. Bong Joon-ho's brilliant new movie packs the kinds of stunning, multi-layered surprises that deserve to be experienced as fresh as possible. I'll tread as cautiously as I can…” Presumably, he believes the movie wouldn’t have been as “stunning” if he hadn’t experienced it from this “fresh” perspective. Not only do people protect their aesthetic experience by delaying the acquisition of information, some have argued that it is best to avoid information altogether about some of life’s pleasures. For example, arguing against funding for research on the psychology of love and interpersonal attraction, the late Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, as quoted by Gilovich, Keltner, Chen, and Nisbett (2016), quipped, “If scientists could understand, weigh, measure, and calculate love, there’d be a lot less of it going on.” In short, information is thought by some to “ruin everything” and lead to less enjoyment. On the other hand, some have adopted the opposite viewpoint: that behind-the-scenes information does not spoil enjoyment, and that the more we know about something the more we may appreciate it and therefore the more we may like it. As Gilovich et al. (2016) wrote, “Knowing that a rainbow is the result of light refracted through droplets of water does not render it less beautiful. Knowing that all living things have been sculpted by evolution does not diminish the wonder of existence. If anything, a deeper understanding typically results in a richer, not a diminished, experience” (p. 88-89). Similarly, after describing sunsets in a stark, THE SONG EXPLODER EFFECT 5 cold, unsentimental, scientific manner, the writer John Green added, “I think it’s helpful to know how sunsets work, and I’ve never bought the romantic notion that scientific understanding somehow robs the universe of its beauty.” Consistent to this sentiment, in a study that examined how physical context and knowledge of artworks influenced aesthetic experience, it was found that curatorial information increased understanding and appreciation of the artworks, while just knowing the title of the artwork did not (Szubielska, Imbir & Szymanska, 2019). The curatorial information helped viewers understand the presentation of the art pieces while the title merely gave them some information about the art piece, but not enough information to yield a nuanced understanding. Moreover, research suggests that reading a short paragraph that includes blatant story spoilers before reading a story actually enhances the experience of reading a story because knowing the ending allows viewers to appreciate the aesthetic elements of the story instead of devoting all of their attention to the plot (Leavitt & Christenfeld, 2013). Thus, knowing that Daenerys Targaryen dies in the final episode of “Game of Thrones” may make the episode even more enjoyable to watch! (This research showed that spoilers about the ending of the story increased liking primarily when the story was complicated. If the story was too simple, and thus had a ceiling effect for fluency, the spoiler did not increase liking because fluency could not be increased; Leavitt et al., 2013.) So which is it? Should one avoid knowing too much about the psychology of love, avoid information about new songs, and look away from all media coverage of new films, or should one seek out such information? Does insider, behind-the-scenes information ruin or enhance aesthetic enjoyment? THE SONG EXPLODER EFFECT 6 Information avoidance has been defined as acting with the intention to prevent or delay the acquisition of available but unwanted information (Sweeny et al., 2010). Research has shown that people avoid information for many reasons. For example, people may avoid information simply to circumvent unpleasant emotions. Staying off of the bathroom scale is one way to avoid regret over having gained weight, and steering clear of news stories about global warming is one way to avoid worry and distress over threats to the natural environment. Information avoidance like this is often comforting to people. For example, many people are reluctant to get genetic screening for medical conditions that do not have any preventative treatments or cures, such as Huntington’s disease (Case, Andrews, Johnson, & Allard, 2005; Dawson et al., 2006). Discovering if one has the gene for Huntington’s disease will only cause one to feel unpleasant emotions, as there is no action that can be taken to treat the disease effectively.

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