2025 RationalWiki 'Oregon Plan' Fundraiser

There is no RationalWiki without you. We are a small non-profit with no staff—we are hundreds of volunteers who document pseudoscience and crankery around the world every day. We will never allow ads because we must remain independent. We cannot rely on big donors with corresponding big agendas. We are not the largest website around, butwe believe we play an important role in defending truth and objectivity.

Fighting pseudoscience isn't free.
We are 100% user-supported! Help and donate $5, $10, $20 or whatever you can today withPayPal Logo.png!
Donations so far: $8765.50Goal: $10000

Mozart effect

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigationJump to search
Against allopathy
Icon alt med alt.svg
Clinically unproven
Woo-meisters
v -t -e


Information icon.svgThis article requires expansion. Pleasehelp.

Though not astub by pure word count, this article lacks depth of content.

TheMozart effect is an infamous bit of poppsychology that posits that listening to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart willhelp your plants grow or your chickens lay more eggs or increase your intelligence. It was first proposed by Gordon Shaw, Frances Rauscher, and Katherine Ky in 1993 and has been turned into a veritable cash cow since then. It is a great case study in how apseudoscientific "factoid" becomes embedded in the public consciousness despite itsflimsyevidentiarybacking.

Contents

Failed replications[edit]

The first paper proposing a "Mozart effect" was Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1993), which found an increase in scores of about 8-9 points on spatial tasks taken from a Stanford-BinetIQ test for subjects who listened to Mozart'sSonata for Two Pianos in D Major.[1] A number ofreplications were attempted, with some finding significant but smaller improvements than the original study and others finding no improvement. A 1999meta-analysis found no improvement for general IQ tasks and a minor, but statistically insignificant, improvement within the variability of a person's IQ task performance for spatial tasks.[2] Further research suggests that the minor effects may be due simply to the improvement of mood after listening to the music rather than anything special about Mozart specifically.[3]

Popular incarnation[edit]

While the original claim for the Mozart effect was only in regard to a temporary (approximately 10-15 minutes after listening to the music) increase in spatial skills, this soon transformed into thepop psychology formulation of "Mozart makes you smarter!", as well as the inverse "Rock music makes you dumber!" It became a fad amongmarketers hawking baby products to sell headphones and CDs topregnant women with claims of producing child geniuses by playing Mozart to them in the womb.[4] In 1998, then-governor ofGeorgia Zell Miller proposed a bill that would provide every mother in the state with a Mozart CD or tape.[5] In 2007, a team ofGerman psychologists and neuroscientists shot down the Mozart effect once again after being flooded with numerous requests to check its veracity.[6]

What should you listen to instead?[edit]

Listen to Bach instead. He's a much better musician anyway.

External links[edit]

References[edit]

  1. Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky.Music and Spatial Task Performance.Nature, vol. 365, p. 611, 14 Oct. 1993
  2. Christopher F. Chabris.Prelude or Requiem for the Mozart Effect?Nature, vol. 400, pp. 826-828, 26 Aug. 1999
  3. William Forde Thompson, E. Glenn Schellenberg, and Gabriela Husain.Arousal, Mood, and the Mozart Effect.Psychological Science, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 248-251, May 2001
  4. TheBelly Sonic is one such example.
  5. Lars Sorenson.Mozart on the Brain: Musical Misadventures in Cognition and Development.Cognition & Language: Birth to Eight, 290:522, November 19, 2008
  6. Alison Abbott.Mozart Doesn't Make You Clever.Nature News, 13 April 2007
Retrieved from "https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Mozart_effect&oldid=2534679"
Categories:
Hidden categories: