Hello everyone, this week I’m going to discuss the findings from a study by two Ryerson University researchers (Good, A., Russo, F. A., 2016) who investigated how group singing, group mural making, and competitive games may influence group cooperation.
All of the experiment’s fifty participants were from YMCA summer camps in downtown Toronto, Canada. The children were from 6-11 years of age and represented a highly diverse ethnic and socioeconomic population. Furthermore, 12 different camp groups were included in the study so as to ensure a variety of ages were well represented. The singing group commenced their program by noting reasons why they loved living in Toronto. Afterward, their ideas were incorporated into a song that they performed together. The art group completed a similar process but incorporated their ideas into a mural that they painted as a group. In the competitive games group, there was no collaborative task but rather a series of competitive activities such as coin tosses.
Following the completion of the activities, all of the children were randomly assigned a partner from within their group. The children then played a modified, child-friendly version of the prisoner’s dilemma game which was developed by Matsumoto, Haan, Yabrove, Theodorou, and Carney (1986). In this version of the game, each child is given one red card representing competition and one blue card representing cooperation. In each round, there are three possible outcomes. If one child chooses a red card and the other a blue card, the red card holder wins two gems. If both children choose a red card neither of them wins any gems, whereas if both children choose a blue card, they both win one gem each.
Prior to starting, the participants were told that the child in each pair with the greatest number of gems at the end of twenty rounds would trade their gems for a prize. (In reality, all of the children were given a prize at the end). In addition, they were permitted to discuss tactics with their partner prior to deciding which card to play. Research assistants paid close attention to these discussions and noted whether or not the children did exactly what they said they would or if they betrayed the other player by playing differently than what they had agreed on.
After analyzing the results from the three activity groups, the singing group cooperated significantly more than the art group or the competitive games group. In fact, cooperation levels were more or less the same for both the art and competitive games groups. Moreover, as the trials continued, the singing group became increasingly cooperative whereas the art and competitive games groups saw no change. The researchers predict that the increase in cooperative behaviour observed after group singing is the result of the vocal, melodic, and respiratory synchrony required for many people to sing a song together. In other words, although we might not be completely aware of it, group singing requires a high level of cooperation between all of the participating singers. For this reason, it may seem more natural for participants to continue cooperating even after moving onto a new task. Whatever it may be, I know I’ll be using group singing in my future classes, not only to create beautiful music but to also create a more cooperative and caring class.
Until next time music and language lovers!
Sources:
Good, A., Russo, F. A. (2016). Singing promotes cooperation in a diverse group of children. Social Psychology 47, 340–344. doi: 10.1027/1864-9335/a000282
Matsumoto, D., Haan, N., Yabrove, G., Theodorou, P., & Carney, C. C. (1986). Preschoolers’ moral actions and emotions in prisoner’s dilemma. Developmental Psychology, 22, 663–670. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.22.5.663