By Katherine Matsui
Thursday, August 4, 2005
Many Americans harbor an obsession with their children’s education, said Chip Heath, associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford. After studying the proliferation of the “Mozart Effect” in media outlets from 1993 to 2001, Heath said that people across the nation latched onto this concept in an attempt to quell their concerns about failing education systems, according to an article published July 27 by the Stanford Business Wire.
Adrian Bangerter, a Swiss psychologist who participated in a post-doctorate program in the Stanford psychology department in 2002, conducted the study with Heath. Bangerter researches psycholinguistics, and he and Heath decided to pursue the study because they were interested in the ways in which ideas evolve in society, Heath told The Daily.
The “Mozart Effect” refers to the claim that listening to Mozart and other classical music can improve one’s IQ or bolster one’s academic performance. It was originally championed in a 1993 ‘Nature’ journal report titled “Music and Spatial Task Performance,” the Business Wire reported. Although this study tested only college-age individuals, showed minimal and evanescent improvements in IQ, and could not be reproduced, the study’s claims hit the ground running — and Americans eagerly devoured them.
“My math teacher plays classical music during tests,” said Katrin Sharp, a high school student from Salt Lake City, Utah who is currently attending a summer program at Stanford. “He says it stimulates our brains.”
The Business Wire article says that people in the U.S. began to believe that listening to classical music had profound effects on high school kids, small children, babies and even fetuses, despite the fact that these age groups had never been studied.
To back up their claim that Americans’ obsession with early childhood education provided fertile breeding ground for the “Mozart Effect,” Heath and Bangerter counted the number of times newspapers in each state mentioned the effect, says the Business Wire Article. Then, they looked at the condition and quality of each state’s system of early education.
Heath said he and Bangerter had ample data with which to work.
“The Mozart Effect was a nice start because we could find exactly where it was born and we could track it as it grew up,” Heath told The Daily.
They found that in states such as Georgia and Florida, where education systems are particularly unsatisfactory, newspapers covered the “Mozart Effect” at higher rates than newspapers in states with better education systems, according to the Business Wire.
From his study, Heath further claims that when societies are confronted with problems, they are eager to snatch up solutions, even when their sources are not reliable, explained the Business Wire. Additionally, he suggested that when media outlets give a certain topic extensive coverage, it often does so due to occurrences such as government decisions and new book releases rather than the unveiling of scientific data.
Heath emphasizes the fact that his theory is just that — a theory, reported the Business Wire. It could just be the “convenient answer,” he said in the article, adding, “we’ve got to look for a realistic way out instead of an easy way out.”
Article URL: http://www.stanforddaily.com/tempo?page=content&repository=0001_article&id=17707
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