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Another study that states obvious facts. Of course listening to music boosts your well-being, heck, doing anything you enjoy doing tends to do so.


Not sure if your response was deliberately obtuse or not, but in case it was accidental I wanted to point out that you may have missed a key word - "social" well-being.

It's one thing if listening to music makes you feel good, but another completely if listening makes you more capable of socialising. This may be more important for others than it is for you.


You are reading into something that isn't there. The study doesn't have to do with music making you more capable of socializing.

The hypothesis being tested is that in the absence of social interaction, people will turn to surrogates in order to make up for the perceived lack. Specifically, they test if music can be such a surrogate. They do some surveys and a kind of silly experiment to provide evidence that yes- it can.

The reason it is rightly called pointless is that it brings nothing actionable to the table.

You cannot extract advice from showing evidence for a common-sense observation: If you feel a certain lack, activities you find pleasurable can diminish that lack.

And look at the experimental setup: They make people play an online game with others where certain people are excluded from playing. It turns out that people who are hyped from listening to their favorite song found this less jarring, hence showing that music can be a "social buffer", i.e. make up for a perceived social exclusion.

Let everyone individually conclude how insightful this experiment is.

EDIT: Misunderstood the nature of the "Cyberball" experiment, fixed


Until it doesn't. It is an obvious fact that a heavy rock will fall faster than a light rock. Only because you have been taught otherwise for all your life do you realize it isn't a fact even though it is obvious.


WHAT?! Given a lack of air resistance (i.e. ideal conditions in a vacuum), they should fall at the same rate


Depends on whether you are talking about an abstract physics model or actually existing rocks on earth. (And actually gravitational force is proportional to both masses.)




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