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Death Metal Music Inspires Joy Not Violence, Study Finds (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: I've had one desire since I was born; to see my body ripped and torn. The lyrics of death metal band Bloodbath's cannibalism-themed track, Eaten, do not leave much to the imagination. But neither this song -- nor the gruesome lyrics of others of the genre -- inspire violence. That is the conclusion of Macquarie University's music lab, which used the track in a psychological test. It revealed that death metal fans are not "desensitized" to violent imagery. The findings are published in the Royal Society journal Open Science. How do scientists test people's sensitivity to violence? With a classic psychological experiment that probes people's subconscious responses; and by recruiting death metal fans to take part. The test involved asking 32 fans and 48 non-fans listen to death metal or to pop whilst looking at some pretty unpleasant images.
Lead researcher Yanan Sun explained that the aim of the experiment was to measure how much participants' brains noticed violent scenes, and to compare how their sensitivity was affected by the musical accompaniment. To test the impact of different types of music, they also used a track they deemed to be the opposite of Eaten. "We used 'Happy' by Pharrell Williams as a [comparison]," said Dr Sun. Each participant was played Happy or Eaten through headphones, while they were shown a pair of images -- one to each eye. One image showed a violent scene, such as someone being attacked in a street. The other showed something innocuous -- a group of people walking down that same street, for example. "If fans of violent music were desensitized to violence, which is what a lot of parent groups, religious groups and censorship boards are worried about, then they wouldn't show this same bias. "But the fans showed the very same bias towards processing these violent images as those who were not fans of this music."
Lead researcher Yanan Sun explained that the aim of the experiment was to measure how much participants' brains noticed violent scenes, and to compare how their sensitivity was affected by the musical accompaniment. To test the impact of different types of music, they also used a track they deemed to be the opposite of Eaten. "We used 'Happy' by Pharrell Williams as a [comparison]," said Dr Sun. Each participant was played Happy or Eaten through headphones, while they were shown a pair of images -- one to each eye. One image showed a violent scene, such as someone being attacked in a street. The other showed something innocuous -- a group of people walking down that same street, for example. "If fans of violent music were desensitized to violence, which is what a lot of parent groups, religious groups and censorship boards are worried about, then they wouldn't show this same bias. "But the fans showed the very same bias towards processing these violent images as those who were not fans of this music."
"Someone" ought to read Paine, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau and then realize half of what they're talking about is socialism in the societal contract context. But you won't, because in Trump's America the illiterates are the patriots, lol?
Good luck with the rope, nazis usually struggle on the gallows. We'll see I guess!
Its in our Nature, We are all natural born killers in some respect.
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For this reason most well-designed social science experiments have moderate sample sizes. Experiments with a moderate number of subjects are affordable, practical, and are biased to false negatives; that means you are less likely to get statistically significant but practically insignificant results. Typical sample sizes (when they can be gotten) are in the 20-50 range. 80 is on the high end, but a *negative* result from a largish sample size is actually pretty robust. Either the differences between fans is non-existent, or it's very small, which is practically speaking the same thing.
Most social science experiments, well actually probably the overwhelming majority, are not well-designed. Have you heard of the replication crisis?
The problem is that most social scientists do not understand mathematics, let alone statistics (a complicated subject with many caveats and nuances) very well. They rote-learn the equations and methods without fully understanding them (or understanding them at all) - I've seen in this practice.
Therefore, whenever you see a study with a sample of 80 (or a few hundred) claiming this or that, the default reaction should be extreme doubt in the results.