This is how Sigal Tifferet and his collaborators found it when they did an experiment on Facebook. The study, published in Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science in 2012, tried to support the idea put forward by GF Miller (2000) that there is a possibility that the musicality of the human being is the result of natural selection through sexual selection . According to the authors, musical ability could be an index of good learning or fine motor skills, or even a sign of purchasing power since acquiring a musical instrument and learning to play it usually has a certain economic cost.
In the experiment, two identical Facebook profiles were created featuring the same smiling young man. The only difference between them was that in one case the young man appeared in the photo with a guitar in the photo while in the other he did not . They selected the Facebook profiles of 100 single women belonging to student groups. Half of them were sent a message from the profile of the young man with the guitar and the other half from the profile of the boy without the instrument. The message, always the same, said something along the lines of ‘Hello, how are you? I like your photo’.
The results showed that 28% of the women accepted the friend request made by the boy who appeared with the guitar , compared to 10% who accepted the young man without the guitar. Thus, the authors conclude that positive responses were significantly more prevalent for the requests of the boy holding the guitar, which seems to have made him more attractive in front of women.
Some questions remain to be resolved in this regard, for example, what would happen if the experiment were done with photos of women inviting men? Would the effect hold? Will the same happen in real contexts outside of social networks on the internet? And how is all this reflected in the human brain ? A whole world to discover.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
