A study by researchers from North-western University’s Kellogg School of Management found something quite interesting.
The study was led by Maryam Kouchaki; she and her team used music to make their 63 student participants feel either calm, by playing relaxing music, or anxious, by playing the iconic, unsettling theme from the movie Psycho.
They asked the students how they felt after listening to psycho, and they indicated that they felt more threatened than the others.
Alex Fradera of the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest did a nice summary of the study. And in the next part of the study, he explained:
The participants next completed a simple computer task for money, for which there was an obvious way to cheat. The non-anxious students made an average of 19 “clear cheats,” whereas the anxious ramped this up to 24. The more threatened the anxious felt, the more they cheated.
In simpler terms, when we’re anxious, we are more concerned about ourselves, and this could lead to us going against the norms.
The study was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
S.O.Z