Abstract for: A System Dynamics Approach to Music-induced Moral Behaviour

The power of music to influence emotions is a renowned process, both intuitively and empirically. However, there is a hiatus of agreement on how this phenomenon is generated, the options being either content-based (the intrinsic properties of the music) or context-based (social, environmental, personal expectations, beliefs, etc.). I am investigating this dichotomy by using online experiments with moral tasks and developing a code for the intrinsic properties of music. Moreover, I am building a computational model to scale up individual altruistic actions to a group’s moral action using social network dynamics to infer the importance of context in emotion generation. In this research, cognitive science and social network dynamics are brought together for the first time in trying to build a new methodological approach for quantifying the prosocial behaviour influenced by music at both individual and collective levels.