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<TD class=dateline colSpan=2 vAlign=top>Stanford Report, February 2, 2005
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<TD vAlign=top width=450><SPAN class=headline>Dubious 'Mozart Effect'
remains music to many Americans' ears<BR></SPAN><SPAN class=deck></SPAN>
<P class=bodytext>BY MARINA KRAKOVSKY</P>
<P>
<DIV class=bodytext>
<P>Scientists have discredited claims that listening to classical music
enhances intelligence, yet this so-called "Mozart Effect" has actually
exploded in popularity over the years.</P>
<P>So says Chip Heath, an associate professor of organizational behavior
who has systematically tracked the evolution of this scientific legend.
What's more, Heath and his colleague, Swiss psychologist Adrian Bangerter,
found that the Mozart Effect received the most newspaper mentions in those
U.S. states with the weakest educational systems—giving tentative support
to the previously untested notion that rumors and legends grow in response
to public anxiety.</P>
<P>"When we traced the Mozart Effect back to the source [the 1993
<I>Nature</I> journal report titled 'Music and Spatial Task Performance'],
we found this idea achieved astounding success," says Heath. The
researchers found far more newspaper articles about that study than about
any other Nature report published around the same time. And as the finding
spread through lay culture over the years, it got watered down and grossly
distorted. "People were less and less likely to talk about the Mozart
Effect in the context of college students who were the participants in the
original study, and they were more likely to talk about it with respect to
babies—even though there's no scientific research linking music and
intelligence in infants," says Heath, who analyzed hundreds of relevant
newspaper articles published between 1993 and 2001.</P>
<P>Not only had babies never been studied, but the original 1993
experiment had found only a modest and temporary IQ increase in college
students performing a specific kind of task while listening to a Mozart
sonata. And even that finding was proved suspect after a 1999 review
showed that over a dozen subsequent studies failed to verify the 1993
result. While many newspapers did report this blow to the Mozart Effect,
the legend continued to spread—overgeneralizations and all. For example,
Heath cites a 2001 article in the <I>Milwaukee Journal Sentinel </I>that
refers to "numerous studies on the Mozart Effect and how it helps
elementary students, high school students, and even infants increase
mental performance." In truth, none of these groups had been studied, says
Heath.</P>
<P>So why did the Mozart Effect take such a powerful hold in popular
culture, particularly in reference to babies and children? Heath and
Bangerter surmised that the purported effect tapped into a particularly
American anxiety about early childhood education. (Bangerter, who was
doing research in Stanford's psychology department during the study, had
been struck by Americans' obsession with their kids' education. For
example, he saw that a preschool near the Stanford campus had the
purposeful name "Knowledge Beginnings," whereas a preschool near a
university in Switzerland was called "Vanilla-Strawberry." The latter made
no lofty claims about its educational goals.) Concern about education was
so great, in fact, that several U.S. states actually passed laws requiring
state-subsidized childcare centers to play classical music or giving all
new mothers a classical music CD in the hospital.</P>
<P>To test their hypothesis that the legend of the Mozart Effect grew in
response to anxiety about children's education, Heath and Bangerter
compared different U.S. states' levels of media interest in the Mozart
Effect with each state's educational problems (as measured by test scores
and teacher salaries). Sure enough, they found that in states with the
most problematic educational systems (such as Georgia and Florida),
newspapers gave the most coverage to the Mozart Effect.</P>
<P>"Problems attract solutions," explains Heath, and people grappling with
complex problems tend to grasp for solutions, even ones that aren't
necessarily credible. "They can be highly distorted, bogus things like the
Mozart Effect," says Heath, adding that similar patterns occur in our
culture's fixation on fad diets and facile business frameworks.</P>
<P>Heath's analysis also found that spikes in media interest generally
corresponded to events outside of science—particularly state legislation
and two pop psychology books, The Mozart Effect and The Mozart Effect for
Children.</P>
<P>Lest Heath's own findings spawn overgeneralizations, he's quick to
point out that the Mozart Effect is a particular type of legend. "The
Mozart Effect points out a solution, whereas urban legends point out a
problem." The prevailing but untested thinking about urban legends holds
that they spread by tapping into public anxiety. But Heath says that even
if the Mozart Effect succeeded by suggesting a solution to an anxiety,
it's not clear why legends that create anxiety would spread. Why, for
example, would people circulate stories about rat meat in KFC meals or
about the perils of flashing your headlights at motorists driving without
their lights on. "I'm still skeptical about the anxiety approach to urban
legends," he cautions.</P>
<P>The anxiety explanation seems simple and convenient on the surface, but
as the history of the Mozart Effect shows, a convenient answer may well be
completely false. As Heath puts it, "We've got to look for a realistic way
out instead of an easy way
out."</P></DIV></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>