MUSIC AND TASK PERSEVERANCE

Abstract

The goal of this research was to investigate if a relationship exists between listening to preferred music and the amount of time one chooses to spend on an outcome task. Music is thought to influence motivation during mundane tasks, but the prospect that this also applies to cognitively demanding tasks has not been thoroughly explored in the literature; experiments that employ background music as an independent variable usually test cognitive performance under temporal constraints. In order to measure a potential effect of preferred background music on task persistence, 27 subjects listened to three conditions of background music while completing word unscrambling tasks. Unbeknownst to the subjects, certain words they were tasked to unscramble had no correct answer. This impossible task allowed the researchers to extrapolate whether the amount of time subjects chose to spend on these impossible scrambles was affected by the type of music playing. There were no significant differences in the mean average time subjects spent on the impossible scrambles between the three conditions. However, the average time spent on the impossible scrambles was greater in both the preferred and non-preferred music conditions compared to the white noise condition. This result may suggest that a larger sample was needed to find any effect of the manipulation on the average time participants spent on the impossible task. Although there were no significant differences between conditions, the greater average persistence times in both music conditions may imply that the background music could affect task perseverance, but more research would be needed to make any conclusive judgments.