Making spontaneous judgments about new people is a fundamental requirement of our social world. People regularly assess how prosocially others will behave in order to guide their interpersonal interactions, and use observations about others’ behaviors to make such trait inferences. Work from music psychology shows that aesthetic activities like music have positive social effects and are associated with prosocial traits, suggesting that observing these behaviors may also dramatically impact interpersonal trait inferences. In this thesis, I explore whether this is the case, and ask if evaluations of others’ sociomoral traits are impacted by their capacities for musicality and aesthetic appreciation. In Chapter 1, I demonstrate that simply knowing about others’ musicality impacts moral evaluations about them. Learning that a person or animal is musical leads participants to judge them as more morally wrong to harm than matched neutral or non-musical characters, irrespective of participants’ own musicality. In Chapter 2, I explore what drives this surprising effect. I show that the impact of musicality on harm judgments is driven by enhanced perceptions of musical individuals’ mental traits, such as their intelligence, emotionality, and ability to experience physical sensations like pain and hunger. In Chapter 3, I show that music is not unique in its impact on interpersonal judgments, and provide evidence that others’ capacity for broader aesthetic appreciation is a crucial underlying factor for judgments of sociomoral traits. I find that individuals doing an activity because they value its intrinsic, aesthetic beauty (whether listening to music, painting, eating, exercising, being in nature, or doing math) are judged as more emotionally sensitive, more compassionate, and less selfish/manipulative towards others, compared to individuals doing the same activity to achieve some external functional goal. Finally, in the last chapter, I apply my findings to a pressing real-world problem: prejudice against marginalized populations. I test the effectiveness of a music-based intervention, involving learning about the musicality of a marginalized individual (e.g., a person experiencing incarceration), in reducing negative social attitudes towards them.
Overall, I highlight that seemingly irrelevant attributes, like musicality and aesthetic engagement, impact interpersonal and moral consideration, carrying implications for social behavior and for interventions to promote real-world prosociality.
