Miscommunication of science: music cognition research in the popular press

Citation: Mehr SA (2015) Miscommunication of science: music cognition research in the popular press. In December 2013, my colleagues and I published the null results of two randomized trials investigating effects of brief parent-child music enrichment on preschoolers' cognitive skills (Mehr et al., 2013). Fully aware of the limitations of our studies, including, of course, that a failure to reject the null hypothesis does not imply evidence in support of the null hypothesis, we conservatively titled the paper " Two randomized trials reveal no consistent evidence for nonmusical cognitive benefits of brief preschool music enrichment. " In the discussion we wrote over 1000 words on why we might not have detected a positive effect, should one exist (pp. 9–10). Nonetheless, a media firestorm ensued, in which press reports claimed not only that our findings affirmed the null hypothesis, but also that they implied a broader conclusion: music lessons confer no cognitive benefits whatsoever (e.g., regardless of child age or training content, duration, or intensity). For instance, the Times of London reported, " Academic benefits of music 'a myth' " (Devlin, 2013); a Boston Globe headline read, " Music doesn't make you smarter, Harvard study finds " (Johnson, 2013); and TIME reported " Music can soothe the soul and speed along creativity, but it won't, according to researchers from Harvard, boost intelligence " (Sifferlin, 2013). These headlines appeared alongside 100 other reports from over 40 countries (partial listing: https://goo. gl/pCwvqG), despite efforts to clarify our findings via numerous interviews, a live Q&A on Reddit, and a New York Times op-ed (Mehr, 2013). Perhaps we should not have been surprised. The idea that " music makes you smarter " is widely accepted by the general public (e.g., Mehr, 2014) and traces back to a sensationalist media interpretation of a Nature paper describing improved spatial task performance after listening to a Mozart sonata (Rauscher et al., 1993). This " Mozart effect " has been called a " scientific legend " (Bangerter and Heath, 2004) and was conclusively debunked (e.g., Chabris, 1999; Thompson et al., 2001), but not before it elicited a media frenzy that affected political policy: it was cited in a US House of Representatives debate on public funding of arts programs (Trescott, 1997) and by President Bill Clinton in a speech on arts education (Hershenson, 2000), and even prompted the governor of Georgia to sign a bill funding the distribution of …