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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."
when asked like their music?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That is what statistics is for. Mathematics can tell you whether 80 is a sufficient sample size better than intuition.
Imagine instead of 80 subjects, you had a million. And suppose you managed to falsify the null hypothesis, and showed that death metal fans *do* have higher rates of desensitization than non-fans. One of two cases holds; either (a) the rate difference is too tiny to care about or (b) you could achieve a statistically significant positive result with a smaller sample size.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"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!
The joy of violence!
Well, I did pretty well when I took the course as an MIT student, thirty-five years ago. The practice of statistics has changed because of SPSS and R, but the principles are the same -- in fact the same principles that allowed the US to beat the Axis Powers in WW2 in production by using statistical sampling. You obviously can't test *every* bomb in a manufacturing lot.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Its in our Nature, We are all natural born killers in some respect.
[($)]
Singing death metal karaoke helps Retsuko to keep her sanity in her struggle with daily office life....
No, you just don't know anything about real mathematical statistics. Bias is a component of error and it is amplified by large sample sizes that are not selected according to a strict randomness or with a designed plan. Simply adding "more samples" does nothing to improve accuracy for inference and in fact reduces it unless sampling (a field in itself) is applied properly.
I'm not sure how playing the music DURING the test is an indicator of anything whatsoever. "Desensitizing," to the extent that has occurred in anyone who is desensitize-able in this way, happens over time. Not on the spot, because of what music is playing. That said, having to listen to Pharrell Williams's "Happy" would indeed bring out in me a joyous lust for violence. Not sure how that would weigh on the stats.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Being forced to listen to Pharrell Williams would enrage me too.
#DeleteChrome
Who knew that science could be so sophisticated? Here, just look at the title of the study: "Implicit violent imagery processing among fans and non-fans of music with violent themes", isn't that impressive? And here's a snippet of the data analysis: "...ratings of arousal to the song Eaten (XÂ=4.03, s.e. = 0.33) than to the song Happy (XÂ=3.34, s.e. = 0.27; F1,31 = 4.15, p = 0.050, ÎG2=0.046; figure 3b)." [Of course Slashdot cannot reproduce this text correctly, but please trust me, it looks very technical.]
Wow, we're talking about Science here with a capital S! We need a science team like this to help us to understand why Facebook inspires depression, not joy.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Since death metal inspires joy, can we start a little thread of our favorite death metal songs?
I'm not a regular death metal listener, but I have to admit that when I hear it I get unreasonably giddy. Here's Cannibal Corpse, who I like because they remind me of a real live version of Deathklok.
https://youtu.be/482tDopNzoc
I listen to this shit and I'm ready to go put my head through some drywall. In next life, I want to come back as a death metal bass player, but hopefully not Murderface.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It makes me want to kill, not the fans.
Table-ized A.I.
You're a complete fraud if you think 80 models millions in a psychological human-reaction experimentation.
Minimum sample size doesn't increase linearly with population size; it asymptotically approaches a fixed value. So what you do is assume the population is arbitrarily large and size your sample accordingly. Yes, for very small populations, say hundreds, you could get away with smaller samples. But the sample size you need for a population of a million and a hundred billion aren't different at all.
The minimum sample size is *extremely* sensitive to effect size. So what you do is look up the minimum size in a table indexed by the smallest effect size you want to detect. Even if the population of the Earth has doubled since the time the table was published, the numbers are still good.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Actually that's a good, but different point. I actually started to make the point that large samples increase the effect of sampling defects but I thought it would be too confusing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Cremated years ago... Sicko
[($)]
Death Metal and Disco are the same.
I am in full agreement with hey!; anonymous coward your understanding of statistics is flawed. Your comprehension of basic concepts is shallow, and your evasive arguments are those of a troll. It was some pleasant surprise to see his/her post with understanding of statistics on this website after so many years. To show you anonymous coward how wrong your are, compared to your claim of a need for larger sample sizes for legitimacy, that again actually introduces even more problems. The element of nonresponse can invalidate any sample created by asking many more people the research question. Suppose you got back 80 responses after asking 80.000 people, it would not be valid. But if you got back 800 from 800.000 or 8000 from 8.000.000 it would be just as invalid. Those who respond are not random in that case and inherently carry bias that increases with sample size increases. Large sample sizes do nothing. In contrast, a well designed small sample - say one with stratified selection to match relevant characteristics - can provide more information than a large sample. A small sample selected properly will be more normal than an unknown population distribution, and will produce results with less error for inference than a census subject to its sampling problems.
Death metal produces headaches. Find a good singer you talentless hacks.
Even Dave Mustaine's vocals would be an improvement to all these bands.
I don't get the feeling that they were only complaining about the n=80 sample size, so I'm just going to leave this over here.
Anonymous coward, you don't even know what a distribution is so just shut up and go away.
This is what shows you are a child. My interests here is providing correct statistical information out of friendly compassion, while yours is a pissing contest with implied threats. You are goading for information you can feed to your Russian troll friends to harass people, but I doubt even on this 2019 slashdot that anyone is stupid enough to comply or immature enough to care.
Your question is wrong. There is nothing to define any sample as "too small" for anything arbitrarily. Effect size is what defines requirements, and that is based on the research question and its scope. What are you trying to estimate, and to what are you applying it? Serious research goes into this and it goes back to long before you were born. Visit a university and try to read something in the math library. Work backwards. I'll see you in a few years, or decades. Cultural difference makes you seem like a primary school child, but perhaps you are just an isolated overly coddled suburban teenager in America.
You're a complete fraud if you think 80 models millions in a psychological human-reaction experimentation.
You can model millions with 80. Of course you can't do it well, but you can do it a lot better than with 8...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
You and hey! are both right, and the AC is trolling you, and you should stop arguing with it. But there are still real questions about the validity of this study. The sample size of 80 may be appropriate, but the paper includes no power analysis or other explanation of how they came up with 80 participants. I'm not saying it's too small a sample; I'm just saying the paper offers no rationale for the sample size.
There's a fair amount of self-reporting on participant behavior. The subjects were all Australian university students about 21 years old. These represent potential problems with the randomness of the sample and the interpretation of the results. The songs they played were averaged in intensity and tempo. Are these changes adequate for isolating the differences between the two?
What if they included a "control" song with an equally ill-defined "neutral" themes--would there be significant differences from the control? What if they tried other "violent" and "happy" songs--would they maintain the same level of significance? The results show that people who listen to a lot of "violent" music were relatively cognitively unimpaired by hearing it in this experiment--what if you tried the same thing using complex Bach cantatas and audiences familiar/unfamiliar with them?
There's plenty to criticize about this experiment, but arbitrarily announcing that n=80 is "too small" a sample size is so silly that it's Not Even Wrong.
Your explanations are probably a waste of time. Regular people are not equipped or educated to understand statistical methods, but they do not understand that either. The Dunning-Kruger effect is particularly strong in this area.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I've been listening to 1990s Slayer and Megadeth lately, and it not only takes me back to another time but it's really good music. Dave Mustain is awesome on guitar and Slayer's drummer is a freak of nature (I can hardly tap multiple fingers to some of his rolls). The lyrics are funny as well ("growing madness as my mind dissolves").
Good stuff. I don't like their more recent stuff though. Biased due to original listening period.
On and on south of heaven!
BlameBillCosby.com
If this experiment were proposed by my master's student, I wouldn't allow them to proceed to perform it based upon the lack of control of the uncountably various factors unaccounted for in the methods. Based upon the limited nature of the experiment, the results are utterly ungeneralizable, and there's no suggestion that they're even repeatable. If sitting on a thesis committee hearing a defense of this paper, I would vote against the student based upon not only their failure to address these issues, but also their failure to enumerate and describe them, in addition to their failure to suggest ways of rectifying their experimental omissions. If peer-reviewing the paper for publication, I would vote to reject it upon the same grounds.
This paper, as it stands, is junk science. It's astonishing that the two lead authors are post-docs and the second two authors are professors. I would expect this level of work to be a mediocre master's thesis that the major professor insisted upon publishing to get a citation for himself and the student. The editor of the journal has had a distinguished career as a supramolecular chemist; it looks like he either didn't actually read the paper or doesn't care about the reputation of his journal. When I first read the paper, I had to look up the journal to make sure it wasn't a sham journal that exists solely to print bullshit.
All that said, I'm not sure I've made clear quite how poorly I evaluate this paper: it's one of the worst I've ever read outside the realm of pseudoscience fantasies about perpetual motion.
As a stats grad student, I took a class where I was in a group with an undergrad business major. We'd just sat through a lecture where the professor has told us why the sample size isn't always 30, and explained how to compute a sample size based upon the estimated population size and estimated variance. When we broke into our groups to compute a sample size for an example problem, the business major said, "That's easy... 30!"
The problem is that most social scientists do not understand mathematics, let alone statistics...
Let alone reality.
This research looks like it was custom made to go for an Ig Nobel.
only a (small?) portion of the population sees in 3 dimensions because one eye dominates. If you're showing two different images to the eyes, won't the dominant eye see whatever is in front of it while the brain tends to ignore the image seen by the other eye?
Most social science experiments, well actually probably the overwhelming majority, are not well-designed.
That is true, but that can not usually be fixed with a larger sample size. If your experiment's testing procedure is bunk, then increasing the sample size is not going to help one bit. Only very, very rarely can a poorly designed experiment be saved by throwing more samples at it.
There are ten thousand different ways to get misleading results out of a poorly designed experiment. One of those ways is interpreting noise in your data as a meaningful signal, where by the barest chance you get a bunch of data points that are all weird outliers by sheer luck.
The other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine ways involve introducing bias into your data -- your experimental procedure is such that you systematically are measuring the wrong thing. Perhaps your experimental subject selection procedure is such that it tends to disproportionately select the weird outliers, or perhaps the phrasing of your questions causes people to answer a different question than the one you were aiming for. This is the broad category is mistakes that social science experiments are particularly vulnerable to.
Choosing a large sample size, and other statistical methods, help avoid the error where you are measuring noise and interpreting it as a useful signal. It does not do anything whatsoever to deal with bias problems. If your experiment falls prey to one of the nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine mistakes where it's measuring a biased signal, then making sure you have a large number of samples will not help in the slightest. Performing your experiment with a million subjects will prove oh so definitely that you are not looking at noise -- you have measured something, all right. But that something could either be a genuine result, or the consequence of bias in your data, and to tell the difference you'll have to examine your experimental procedure in a way that has nothing to do with statistics or sample sizes.
Large sample sizes are a remedy against one specific way to ruin your experiment, out of ten thousand gotchas to watch for. It doesn't mean your procedure is sound, only that it's one mistake you didn't make. And conversely, it's not a silver bullet to avoid the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine problems either -- if your sample size is large enough to avoid the noise-based problems, then making it even larger will not help with the other gotchas.
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.
I don't think this follows at all.
The lesson here is that a sufficiently large corporation is indistinguishable from government. --ultranova
that people listen to music that makes them happy?
Moscow has a new submission !
I don't think this follows at all.
Let me rephrase: when you see any social science or psychology study claiming anything, the first reaction should be extreme doubt in the results.
Den-tist, jugga-jigga-wugga!
Deli-Style jugga-jigga-wugga!
Dela-Soul jugga-jigga-wugga!
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Linzey Rae's Metal Kitchen never fails to make me smile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There's only a handful, but it's taking death metal songs, and changing the lyrics to cooking lessons.
I'm more of a heavy metal / thrash metal person, though ... Ministry, Gwar, and Prong are typically the closest to death metal that I regularly listen to. (although I *do* have Napalm Death's Utopia Banished in my library)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Steven Wilson mentions, in association with the "In absentia" record, that he is attracted to, and uplifted by dark, sad music, and I feel the same way... Music seems to be mind and mood altering, and very subtle in its shades of action. I can feel one kind of joy listening to an upbeat song, and be also moved by the stark melancholy of another which is another facet of joy, and neither negates the validity of the other. The idea that violent thoughts can be initiated by engaging in music listening, movie watching, video game playing, etc.... is a complex and interesting subject, and people, and especially politicians should not rush to judgement
No, I have education in statistical methods. You obviously do not. That makes you uneducated, incompetent and arrogant. In actual reality, it depends entirely on the border-conditions.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It inspires me to want to poke my eardrums out with a pencil.
It reminds me of how my mother hated the music I listened to until she saw me play on stage back in '94. She had the best way of describing us and the crowd: "That gives a whole new meaning to 'flipping your wig!'"
One of the secrets of extreme metal (be it death, black, thrash, or anything requiring high energy and stamina) is most of us are nerds showing off how far they can push their limits on their instruments. One of my sources of joy is trying my "Sub-Bass" out on other bassists. Once they get past the giant strings, it's neat to see what others can do with it.
"The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games." - Eugene Jarvis
Ha. That was the gist of social contract theory as espoused throughout the 17th and 18th C.
Hooker,
Hobbes,
Locke - Madison, Jefferson
Diderot,
Montesquieu
And, of course, enshrined in Blackstone.
It started being altered in the 19th C with the Counter-Enlightenment theorists.
Just as liberals appropriated the term "liberal" meaning individual liberty- it flipped the concept of rights around from that which you have by being born to that given to you by governments. Here's how you know what a right is - if someone needs to provide to you (education, healthcare, housing) then it's not a right. If it's something you have - that can only be infringed by others - for instance the right to speak your opinions, speak your opinions in public, publish them, believe in the god of your choice (or not) - then it's a right.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond