The importance of being honest? Evidence that deception may not pollute social science subject pools after all.

Deceiving participants about the goals or content of a study is permitted in psychological research but is largely banned in economics journals and subject pools. This ban is intended to protect a public good: If experiencing deception causes participants to be suspicious in future studies, and suspicion meaningfully influences their behavior, then the entire field suffers. We report a survey of psychologists' and economists' attitudes toward deception (N = 568) and a large, nondeceptive multisite study in which we measured participants' histories, suspicion levels, and behavior in four common economic tasks (N = 636). Economists reported more negative attitudes toward deceptive methods and greater support for the deception ban than did psychologists. The results of the behavioral study, however, do not support the "public good" argument for banning deception about the goals or content of a research study: Participants' present suspicion was not clearly related to past experiences of deception, and there were no consistent behavioral differences between suspicious and credulous participants. We discuss the implications of these results for the ongoing debate regarding the acceptability of deceptive research methods.

Genomic Imprinting Is Implicated in the Psychology of Music.

Why do people sing to babies? Human infants are relatively altricial and need their parents' attention to survive. Infant-directed song may constitute a signal of that attention. In Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS), a rare disorder of genomic imprinting, genes from chromosome 15q11-q13 that are typically paternally expressed are unexpressed, which results in exaggeration of traits that reduce offspring's investment demands on the mother. PWS may thus be associated with a distinctive musical phenotype. We report unusual responses to music in people with PWS. Subjects with PWS ( N = 39) moved more during music listening, exhibited greater reductions in heart rate in response to music listening, and displayed a specific deficit in pitch-discrimination ability relative to typically developing adults and children ( N = 589). Paternally expressed genes from 15q11-q13, which are unexpressed in PWS, may thus increase demands for music and enhance perceptual sensitivity to music. These results implicate genomic imprinting in the psychology of music, informing theories of music's evolutionary history.

Universality and diversity in human song.

What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world's societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography-analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions-reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral context; that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal; that music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and that elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws.