The influence of music on risk attitude

Given its potential uses, Risk Attitude (RA) has been widely studied in the literature on behavioral and financial decision making. Researchers have tried to deepen how it could be affected by several stimuli. Some theoretical work has been done on the relationship between emotions, moods and risk perception: Parrott (2017) presented two main frameworks within which emotions might affect the perception of risk: appraisal-tendency framework and feelings- as-information theory. So far, as remarked by Huyen et al. (2017), all of the studies have employed priming items which may be considered as semantically and/or conceptually connected with the primed construct. Our challenge is to verify whether an affective and non-linguistic priming such as the listening of a musical piece could affect the RA in three different domains of decision making: ethics, gambling and prosocial. In two separated studies we attempted to assess the influence of four previously-checked solo piano tunes representing four different emotions (joy, relaxation, sadness, annoyance) (Ansani et al. 2019) on the above-mentioned domains. After a 3-minutes long listening session, the participants answered two questions in a counterbalanced randomized order: • ethical scenario: decide whether to cheat on a career advancement test to get promoted at the risk of being fired if caught (Study 1 - N = 178) • prosocial scenario: in the same career advancement test of Study 1, decide whether to help a dear colleague at the risk of being excluded from the test (Study 2 – N = 103) • gambling question: decide whether to bet on the favorite horse (2:1) or on an outsider (7:1) (Study 1 and 2) Preliminary results show that in the ethical scenario (Study 1) joy, relaxation and annoyance induced through music led to more risk aversion compared with controls (no music condition). In the prosocial scenario (Study 2) only annoyance produced more egoistic choices compared to controls. Unlike some brand new findings by Israel et al. (2019), no music affected our participants’ answers in the gambling question (Study 1 and 2). Greene’s dual process moral theory (Greene et al. 2001) might be a suitable explanation for these findings. Comparing our results with those of Israel et al. (2019) is also a way to address the question about how music works as a manipulative tool.