Music for social convergence in times of spatial distancing 

Niels Christian Hansen, Assistant Professor, AIAS and Department of Clinical Medicine, Center for Music in the Brain 

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic provided an ecologically valid mass experiment on the negative effects of social isolation on mental health and wellbeing. For many people, the resulting need for effective, accessible, and lockdown-compatible psychological coping strategies was met through active engagement with creative art forms such as music. This seed project entailed a large-scale, multinational survey on quantitative and qualitative changes in music listening and music making behaviours in a demographically representative sample of 5,113 individuals from France, Germany, India, Italy, UK, and The State of New York collected during April-May 2020. Whereas more than half of respondents reported using music for coping, people experiencing negative and positive emotions differed in terms of using music for solitary emotional regulation or as a proxy for social interaction, respectively. Light gradient-boosted machine regressor models revealed that interest in other people’s coronamusic was the most important predictor of musical coping. The second project component—a crowdsourced database of corona-themed YouTube videos and news reports shared online—conveniently illuminates this phenomenon. Taken together, the project results emphasise the importance of real-time musical responses to societal crises as well as individually tailored adaptations in musical behaviours to meet socio-emotional needs.

The Effect of Climate Change Threat on Intergroup Relations and Support for Violent Extremism 

Mathias Osmundsen, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science 

Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated that perceived climate change threat can lead to ethnocentrism and authoritarianism coupled with negative attitudes towards dangerous (e.g., drug dealers) or derogated (e.g., fat people) social groups. This project takes a step further by investigating the effect of climate change threat on attitudes of social majority towards ethnic/religious minorities and climate change refugees, as well as on the support for extreme pro-climate and far-right environmentalist (ecofascist) actions. We also examine a number of potential moderators and mediators such as dispositional and situational emotions, climate group efficacy, and perceived life control. The project design is based on two online survey experiments with self-defined white British respondents (N=600 in each survey). 

Moral Leaders – Moral Subordinates? Studying mutual influence in dyadic interactions online 

Simon Tobias Karg, PhD Student, Department of Management 

Abstract: Leaders are often said to shape the ethical conduct of their organization in a hierarchical, top-down way. The central idea is that leaders are moral role-models: if a leader is ethical, they will instill ethical behavior in their subordinates. Yet, there may also be the possibility for bottom-up processes, such that subordinates influence ethical behavior in leaders. In this project, we study mutual influence of leaders in subordinates in a dyadic game, investigating how the team setup can lead to the development of ethical or unethical behavior. In the talk, I will address special challenges of conducting interaction studies online, using online participant pools.