Ethos Theory of Music: Toward An Empirical Confirmation Through Moral Foundations Theory

Abstract

As an advocate of the Ethos Theory of Music, Herbert Spencer argues that sharing in a wide range of musically aroused emotions promotes fellow-feeling thanks to which humans behave considerately toward each other. Here we attempt to provide empirical evidence for this claim. We identified Spencer's fellow-feeling as an instantiation of the concerns for Harm and Fairness Moral Foundations; thus, we predicted that musical expertise, and specifically long-term listening to and playing classical music, would lead to favoring individualizing moral foundations and opposing the binding ones. A cross-national questionnaire (US, Canada, and Italy) was conceived (N = 330), and the data were analyzed through a parallel mediation Structural Equation Model. Results confirm that musical expertise is associated with lower proclivity toward the binding moral foundations. Conversely, it is connected with an embracement of individualizing moral foundations. Coherently with Spencer's view, such an effect is fully mediated by the emotional way of listening to music.

Keywords

ethos music moral foundations moral character

Introduction

The ethos theory of music is both the earliest known philosophical hypothesis and the earliest known psychological theory. (The two disciplines were not, of course, distinct in the ancient world.) The theory that regularly listening to certain sorts of music can have a positive effect on listeners’ characters is traceable to Pythagoras and is articulated by Plato (1969) and Aristotle (1932). Advocates of the ethos theory also often believed that other sorts of music can have a negative effect on listeners’ characters. Versions of the ethos theory were adopted in the middle ages, in both the Latin West and the Islamic world. A version was adopted, for example, by the Ikhwān al-safā’ (Brethren of Purity) in the tenth century (Shiloah, 1993) and by De Grocheio (2011) in the fourteenth century. Early modern writers such as Mattheson (1981) continued to believe in the moral benefits of frequent listening to certain sorts of music. The ethos theory was adopted in non-Western traditions, including China's Confucian school (Harold, 2016). Advocates of the ethos theory, including Plato, Aristotle, and many others, typically hold that only long-term exposure to music will have an effect on moral character. They also typically maintain that only certain sorts of music will have a positive effect on character. Some sorts of music are held to have a deleterious effect on character. Although widely adopted, this theory lacks experimental support. This work is a first step towards discovering empirical support for the ethos theory.

Little effort has been made to find experimental evidence that supports the theory. Seidel and Prinz (2013) refer to Aristotle and believe that their results support his hypothesis concerning the effects of music on moral character. In fact, they test a very different hypothesis. They garner evidence that supports the view that music has a short-term influence on listeners’ emotional states and that these emotional states influence the moral judgments made by these listeners. They do not test the hypothesis that long-term listening to certain sorts of music has a positive effect on character traits. Other studies, including Ansani, D’Errico, and Poggi (2017, Ansani et al., 2019), Pastötter, Gleixner, Neuhauser, and Bäuml (2013), Seidel and Prinz (2012, 2013), and Ziv, Hoftman, and Geyer (2012) have also examined how emotions aroused by music can influence moral judgment without investigating the impact that regular listening to certain genres of music may have on character.

Many early statements of the ethos theory are vague about how music affects the character or posit implausible mechanisms whereby music has an effect on character. Only in the nineteenth century was a plausible mechanism identified with any precision. The current research project is inspired, in part, by Herbert Spencer's essay, “The Origin and Function of Music” (Spencer, 1864). Spencer held that music is expressive of emotion when it resembles human expressive behavior. Additionally, he held that when music is expressive of emotion in this way, listeners are able to “partake” of the corresponding emotional states and that, consequently, listening to music makes people “sharers in the joys and sorrows of others.” Spencer holds that sharing in a wide range of emotions aroused by music promotes fellow-feeling and adds that “by their fellow-feeling men are led to behave justly, kindly and considerately towards each other” (1864, pp. 235–36). In other words, Spencer's hypothesis is that as people listen to music, they experience a wide range of human emotions (Young, 2021). Experience of these emotions, he hypothesizes, leads to enhanced fellow-feeling and an increased disposition to behave justly, kindly, and considerately towards their fellow people. Unlike Plato, Aristotle, and many other advocates of the ethos theory, Spencer does not explicitly say that only certain sorts of music will have these benefits. However, he clearly has common practice classical music (that is, the Western classical music tradition from about 1650 to about 1900) in mind when speaking of the moral benefits of music, referring as he does to composers such as Mozart and Mendelssohn. Moreover, he implies that this music is a development of simpler, less efficacious music. This is the hypothesis that is tested in the research reported in this paper.

Part of Spencer's proposal already enjoys strong empirical support. In particular, a lot of evidence indicates that music is expressive of emotion when it resembles a human expression of that emotion. See Juslin and Laukka (2003) for a meta-analysis of 104 studies. As well, a significant body of evidence also indicates that music has the capacity to arouse or, as Spencer says, enable listeners to partake of, ordinary emotions such as joy and sorrow (Krumhansl, 1997; Scherer, 2004; Zentner, Grandjean, & Scherer, 2008). Some studies suggest that the resemblance of music to human expressive behavior contributes to its capacity to arouse emotion (Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008). Some researchers, such as Konečni (2008), continue to deny that music arouses ordinary emotions, but these increasingly appear to be outliers. What is lacking is evidence that regular listening to music that arouses ordinary emotions is correlated with positive effects on character.

Historically, advocates of the ethos theory have said little about which music has the potential to have a positive effect on character. We hypothesize that listening to classical music and, in particular, the common practice tradition, will have moral benefits. Common practice composition employs large harmonic resources and has a large expressive range (Young, 2016). As a result, listening to classical music might enable listeners to experience a wider range of emotional states than listening to popular music. Music that enables listeners to experience a wider range of emotional states might then be associated with greater fellow feeling. Our decision is also supported by an fMRI study (Huang, Huang, Luo, & Mo, 2016) which found that classical music activated the Theory of Mind areas (e.g., PCC/PC, arMFC, and TPJ) to a greater extent as opposed to popular music. This indicates more involvement of social cognition, and, in greater detail, cognitive empathy, while listening to classical music. The authors conclude that they found “clear neuronal evidence supporting the view that artistic music is of intelligence while the popular music is of physiology” (Huang et al., 2016, p. 12).

A clarification is due here: the fact that we are studying the relationship between common practice classical music and moral attitudes should be seen as a way to narrow the field to a genre whose expertise is easier to be assessed, given its level of institutionalization in schools and conservatories. This, together with its wide emotional range, are the main reasons for which we deemed common practice classical music was the best candidate for this initial study. Nevertheless, this by no means implies that other genres cannot have similar effects. We do not deny that other musical traditions may have the expressive range to generate effects similar to those hypothesized to flow from listening to classical music in the common practice tradition, but the present study focuses on common practice music: it is aimed to test the hypothesis that the fellow-feeling and accompanying disposition to behave justly, kindly and considerately towards fellow people increases in people more accustomed to music listening and music practising. Advocates of the ethos theory have always maintained that only certain sorts of music have moral benefits. However, future studies can investigate whether musical genres besides common practice composition do, or do not, promote fellow-feeling. A thorough description of how we planned to operationalize such a fellow-feeling is presented in the next section.

Moral Foundations Theory

The goal of this paper is to provide empirical evidence of the Ethos Theory of Music (from here on, ETM). Yet, it goes without saying, there is no psychological measurement tool to directly assess such a theory. Furthermore, the very fact of embarking on such an endeavor presents an important challenge; namely, to translate a philosophical position (i.e., ETM) into some operationalizable and empirically testable psychological constructs. This is by no means straightforward: as a philosophical position, the ETM's nature is primarily prescriptive and more nuanced than a testable, merely descriptive psychological construct (for the cross-pollination of prescriptive and descriptive, see Machery & Doris, 2017); moreover, the formulations of ETM are not unambiguous or consistent. Thus, in an effort to provide the ETM with a proper psychological measurement tool, we embraced a well-established theory of moral psychology, namely, the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) by Graham, Haidt, and Nosek (2009, 2018). MFT posits two sets of inborn Moral Foundations (from now on, MF) categories: Individualizing (i.e., Harm/Care and Fairness/Cheating) and binding MFs (i.e., Authority/Subversion, Ingroup or Loyalty/Betrayal, and Purity/Degradation). According to their proponents, the Harm and Fairness foundations are mainly concerned with protecting the rights and freedoms of single individuals. Conversely, ingroup (or loyalty), authority, and purity are focused on preserving the group as a whole (Haidt & Graham, 2007). The advantage of exploiting MFT is two-fold: First, it forces us to make the ethical notions more detailed and specified to the point of being empirically testable through a standardized measurement tool, that is, the MFs Questionnaire (Graham et al., 2011). Second, as MFT implies moral pluralism, that is, it assesses a set of five different moral concerns (Graham et al., 2013), it gives us the possibility to discover, through proper testing, which MFs the moral benefits postulated by the ETM are evidenced.

As concerns our conceptualization of the MFs, it is akin to that proposed by Ansani et al. (2021), according to which another crucial difference between Individualizing and Binding MFs lies in how people conceive of societal organization: Harm and Fairness concerns imply a horizontal systemization of the society and a tendency toward inclusion. Their advocates’ ideal society is one wherein all individuals are equal to one another, and no one has to be harmed for any reason. On the other hand, the binding MFs assume a hierarchical organization; that is, an exclusive paradigm. From this standpoint, the individuals can by no means be equal to one another; there exist differences based on power (i.e., Authority), group membership (i.e., Ingroup > Outgroup), and degree of moral stance (i.e., Purity). Following these criteria, there can be acceptable and not acceptable acts and individuals. To conclude, we embrace the idea of distinguishing MFs into horizontalizing vs hierarchicalizing values.

Phylogenesis and Ontogenesis of MFs

If we consider the MFs from an evolutionary standpoint, the hierarchicalizing ones seem to be more primitive in that they tend to preserve the herd as a whole through excluding and marginalizing behaviors (that is the reason why they are referred to as “binding”). Conversely, the horizontalizing MFs might be considered as a posterior human conquest, apt to safeguard each and every individual: every member of the group/society has to be treated equally and no one has to be harmed, regardless of their provenience, societal status, physical or psychological characteristics. Indeed, there is ambiguous evidence as to whether reciprocity (i.e., the best predictor of fairness), can be found in other animals (Haidt, 2008).

Moreover, the principles that every member of the group or society has to be treated equally and no one has to be harmed, regardless of their provenance, societal status, physical, or psychological characteristics, can hardly be observed in wild nature; although some great apes are able to exhibit some prosocial concern, they seem to behave in such a manner just in dyadic interactions or within-group contexts (Burkart, Brügger, & van Schaik, 2018); conversely, human morality always involves third party morality. As Tomasello pointed out: “Fairness is a much more complex psychological phenomenon and may be uniquely human” (Tomasello, 2018, p. 662). More in detail, here is a brief description of moral phylogenesis by the same author (notes in italics within parentheses are ours):

“[…] contemporary human beings are under the sway of at least three distinct moralities. The first is simply the cooperative proclivities of great apes in general, organized around a “special sympathy for kin and friends (i.e., Ingroup): the first person I save from a burning shelter is my child or spouse, no deliberation needed. The second is a joint morality of collaboration in which I have specific responsibilities to specific individuals in specific circumstances: The next person I save is the firefighting partner with whom I am currently collaborating (and with whom I have a joint commitment) to extinguish the fire. The third is a more impersonal collective morality of cultural norms and institutions in which all members of the cultural group are equally valuable (i.e., Fairness and Harm): I save from the calamity all other groupmates equally and impartially (or perhaps all other persons, if my moral community is humanity in general), with perhaps special attention to the most vulnerable among us (e.g., children)” (Tomasello, 2016, p. 6)

Furthermore, the ontogenetic development of moral reasoning seems to confirm the idea that the concerns for Harm and Fairness are more recent than those for Authority and Ingroup. For instance, in the well-known Kohlberg's six stages of moral development (Kohlberg, 1971a, 1971b), the consideration of each individual's rights and interests together with the absorption of the principles of justice and equality (i.e., Fairness) is reached at the last stages, namely, postconventional morality. Conversely, in the early stages of moral reasoning, the child's moral conduct is mainly based on obedience and fear of punishment (i.e., Authority–Stage 1) and, subsequently, conformity to the majority of their social group (i.e., Ingroup–Stage 3, conventional morality).

Consistent with this point, the key emotions corresponding to Harm and Fairness MFs are more recent and sophisticated than those related to the binding ones: suffice it to say that Harm and Fairness concerns might elicit gratitude, guilt, and compassion (Haidt, 2013, p. 139), whereas the binding MFs are responsible for fear, respect, and disgust, that is, three of the most phylogenetically ancient emotions (Rozin & Fallon, 1987). Notably, primary emotions, such as disgust or fear, are wired within the most ancient regions of the brain and are thought to have evolved among our pre-mammal ancestors. Parental altruism emotions, such as a mother's love for her offspring, might have appeared among early mammals; whereas social emotions, such as guilt and pride, can only be observed among social primates.

The idea that the Individualizing MFs are phylogenetically and ontogenetically more recent than the Binding ones to the point of potentially being uniquely human (Tomasello, 2018, p. 662 quoted above) implies that their embracement requires more sophisticated structures and reasoning in the human mind. This resonates with the results by Huang et al. (2016), who found that, as opposed to popular music, classical music is more complex, less simplistic and repetitive, thus demanding a complex intellectual and empathic response. This notion constitutes the foundation of our research hypotheses.

Research Hypotheses

According to our conceptualizations, evidence for the ETM might be found by searching for the above-mentioned fellow-feeling thanks to which “men are led to behave justly, kindly and considerately towards each other” (Spencer, 1864, p. 235) among the people who listen and practice music the most. Therefore, ETM could be confirmed insofar as listening to classical music and, in particular, the common practice tradition, constitutes a drive of human morality toward its phylogenetically and ontogenetically most advanced standards, namely, those substantiated in the higher concerns for the horizontalizing MFs of Harm/Care and Fairness/Cheating to the detriment of the hierarchicalizing ones. A detailed description of the hypotheses is provided in this section.

Authority

H₁:

People who regularly listen to classical music will display less tendency to defer to authority.

Those with a tendency towards justice, kindness, and consideration are expected not to believe that some people deserve special consideration. Moreover, high Authority MF scores are associated with decreased empathic concern (Dawson, Han, & Choi, 2021), increased punitiveness (Silver & Silver, 2017) and loyalty to an ingroup (Graham et al., 2011); on the contrary, we hypothesize that individuals who regularly listen to or play classical music will be more empathetic, less punitive, and will believe that loyalty ought to be more general. Thus, we predict that the Authority MF score will fall with increased musical expertise.

Ingroup

H₂:

Regular, long-term listening to or playing classical music will lead to a lower tendency to favor in-group members.

That is, this sort of listening is expected to be correlated with a tendency toward justice and fairness, increased fellow-feeling should lead to the belief that out-group members are deserving of just treatment and kindness equal to that accorded to in-group members; thus, we hypothesize a decrease in the concern for the Ingroup MF.

Purity

H₃:

Regular, long-term listening to and playing classical music is also expected to be correlated with a lower tendency to believe certain acts as disgusting or unnatural, namely, the Purity MF. This prediction is mainly based on the fact that individuals with high scores in Harm and Fairness domains (e.g., liberals) tend to care less about Purity issues (Graham et al., 2009). Furthermore, such a tendency toward the individualizing MFs implies a deeper consideration for each individual's values and cultural specificities, thus leading to moral pluralism, which is not embraceable by the advocates of Purity.

Fairness

H₄:

Most importantly, as discussed above, people who regularly listen to and play classical music will be more likely to endorse the most evolved moral standards; thus, they will believe that all persons ought to be treated fairly, that is, the score in Fairness MF should increase as Musical Expertise increases.

Harm

H₅:

By embracing a more evolved type of inner moral reasoning, and thanks to the fellow-feeling elicited by music listening and practice, people who regularly listen to classical music should be more prone to compassion and empathic concern. Thus, as both compassion and empathy belong to the Harm entry of the MF dictionary (Graham et al., 2009), and correlations between Harm score and empathic traits such as empathic concern and perspective-taking have already been found (Dawson et al., 2021), we hypothesize a positive relationship between Musical Expertise and Harm MF. More generally, the individualizing/horizontalizing MFs together have been proven to predict several compassion measures, among which are empathy, recognizing suffering, and willingness to act (Miller & Verhaeghen, 2022).

Mediation Hypothesis

In accordance with Spencer's principle, according to which music is able to let its listeners experience a wide range of emotions, these hypotheses can be refined by taking into account a further mediating variable: the extent to which music arouses emotions or mere formal appreciation in people. Actually, not all listeners report having emotions aroused in them by music. Kivy (1990) is a philosopher well-known for denying that he experiences ordinary emotions while listening to music. Kivy and other listeners report that they focus on the formal properties of music and that listening to music is a kind of intellectual problem solving. Others instead are highly affected by emotions when listening to music. We might call these two types of reaction to music “formalism” and “emotionalism,” respectively (Kania, 2020, chapter 2). Formalism implies that music appreciation should only concern the so-called “formal” properties of music, i.e., the constituent elements of a musical arrangement, including rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic structures, dynamics, cadences, timbre, and tempo. A formalist listener believes that the aesthetic value of music is to be found in the experience of this form per se, which makes music appreciation a primarily intellectual activity (Hanslick, 1957, p. 11). Emotionalism, on the other hand, is concerned with the idea that we can only experience a piece of music aesthetically if we experience a certain kind of feeling aroused by the music itself. For an emotionalist listener, the experience of music is first and foremost an emotional experience, whether related to forms of desire and aversion, distress, joy, or pleasure and displeasure (Budd, 1985, p. 140).

We hypothesize that:

H₆:

Listeners’ different ways of listening to music (i.e., Formalism vs Emotionalism) will mediate the effects of Musical Expertise on the MFs.

In particular, we hypothesize that more formalist listeners will experience fewer moral effects from listening to music than do listeners who value the emotional expressiveness of music. On the contrary, those listeners who embrace a more emotionally-involving music listening, thanks to the empathic fellow-feeling mentioned above, will tend to score higher in the horizontalizing MFs, which can be considered as a less primitive and more evolved form of morality.

Materials and Method

An online questionnaire was built to test our hypotheses. No rewards were assigned to the participants; participation was encouraged with no limits of age or musical expertise. In the first screen, participants provided informed consent for the inclusion, collection, and publication of data in aggregate form. All authors distributed the questionnaire among their students and acquaintances. The whole questionnaire was available in two languages (English and Italian).

Measures

Musical Expertise

In accordance with our hypotheses, we built a composite score to assess the participants’ Musical Expertise. Such a score encompasses six key aspects of our concept of expertise; namely:

Three-level self-reported musical competence:

Musically naive

Amateur

Professional

Years of musical training in classical music, ranging from 0 to 15 or more (in greater detail, the options were 0, 1–3, 4–6, 7–9, 10–12, 13–15, 15 or more).

Hours of musical training per week: no musical training, once a week, 1 h per day, from 2 to 4 h per day, more than 4 h per day).

Classical music listening frequency: never, once a month or less, once a week, several times a week, every day, more than once a day.

Attending concerts: Once a year or less, more than once a year, once a month, more than once a month, once a week or more.

Age at the time of first Exposure: The (reverse coded) question was: At what age did the training in the performance of classical music (if any) begin? The answers were arranged through an 8-point scale with 5-year intervals ranging from 0 (i.e., no training in classical music at all) to after 30 years old.

The Musical Expertise composite score had good internal reliability (Cronbach's α = 0.81, McDonald's ω = 0.86). Furthermore, to be safer about the internal consistency of such a nonstandardized scale, we computed the nonparametric Spearman's rank correlations across these variables (full correlation matrix in Supplemental materials). All the correlations were significant at p < .001; Spearman's ρ values ranged from ρ = 0.32 to ρ = .82, average ρ being ρ = 0.49.

Musical Experience

To assess the way in which our participants experience music, we built a 5-item questionnaire which is designed to identify subjects’ ways of listening to music. Two of the questions on the questionnaire were designed to identify subjects who may be described as formalist listeners (i.e., “When I’m concentrated on the experience of music, I feel as though I am solving an intellectual puzzle” and “I revel in the pleasing array of tones just as I enjoy patterns of colours in a kaleidoscope”). In the absence of a specific tool to measure such a listening style, these items were specifically built to condensate two prototypical cognitive features of formalists listeners; namely, the analytical attention to the musical stimulus in terms of its structural and syntactical properties, and, more in general, the reward they experience from detecting “musical systems, relationships, structures, and conventions” (Bowman, 1991, p. 54).

The other three items measured the extent to which a participant could be described as an emotionally involved listener (i.e., “When I’m concentrated on the experience of music, I value the emotional expressiveness of music”, “I feel relaxation that helps me forget about my daily life”, and “I feel the music in my body”). These items were built considering several studies on how music is experienced as an emotionally rewarding stimulus. In greater detail, the first item refers to the Emotion Evocation factor of the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ) (Mas-Herrero, Marco-Pallares, Lorenzo-Seva, Zatorre, & Rodriguez-Fornells, 2013, 2014); the second item condensates the Revival and Diversion emotion regulation strategies of the Music in Mood Regulation scale (Saarikallio, 2008, 2012; Ansani, Mallia, & Saarikallio, forthcoming); the third item considers the Sensory-Motor factor of the BMRQ (Mas-Herrero et al., 2013, 2014).

MFs Questionnaire

To assess the moral proclivities of our participants, we employed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire in its original English version (Graham et al., 2011). For the Italian participants, the wording of the Italian validation study was used (Bobbio, Nencini, & Sarrica, 2011).

The questionnaire is made of two parts (10 items each); in the first part (i.e., moral relevance), the recipients have to rate the extent to which they consider as relevant some considerations when deciding whether something is right or wrong (e.g., “Whether or not some people were treated differently than others”). In the second part (i.e., moral judgemnts), 10 morally salient sentences are presented to the recipients; the task is to indicate the relative agreement or disagreement (e.g, “People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong”). In both parts, the participants had to rate each sentence through a 6-point agreement Likert scale.

Participants and Power Analysis

An a priori power analysis was run through Soper's (2022) calculator to assess the necessary sample size for an SEM model. In the absence of similar modeling studies, a medium effect size was hypothesized; the desired power was set to 0.80 and α to 0.05. The minimum sample size to detect effects was 177. However, given the low rates of total completion of the online questionnaires, we recruited 403 participants. Subsequently, we excluded those who had not completed the questionnaire or refused to accept the informed consent (N = 73). No other exclusion criteria were followed.

We thus ended up with 330 valid participants (47.7% females, Mean age: 29.0 SD = 15.5, range: 18–91). The nationalities of participants were American and Canadian (56.8%) and Italian (43.2%).

Results

Statistical Apparatus

All statistical analyses were executed through R via Jamovi's SEMLj suite (the Jamovi project, 2022; Gallucci, 2022); the Structural Equation Model (i.e., SEM) was made via the “lavaan” package (Rosseel et al., 2023). In the results of the SEM, the reader will find the standardized estimate (β), standard error (SE), level of statistical significance (p-value), and the 95% confidence interval (95% CI).

Structural Equation Model

To test our hypotheses, we opted for a SEM (Figure 1). This was done for two main orders of reasons: first, as we administered the questionnaire in two languages (i.e., English and Italian) and we built some of the measurement tools ourselves (i.e., Musical Expertise, Formalism, and Emotionalism), we needed to give careful attention to the accuracy of the measurements. Fortunately, SEM models are suitable for this purpose because they comprehend a direct assessment of the measurement model together with an estimate of the causal regression paths (Bollen & Pearl, 2013; Hair, Black, Babin, & Anderson, 2019). On the other hand, we resorted to an SEM model out of statistical parsimony; that is, to aggregate in a single analysis the assessments of both the measurement validity and direction and significance of the regression paths.

Figure 1.

Structural equation model.

A double parallel mediation SEM was built with eight latent variables: The only exogenous variable was Musical Expertise, whereas two orders of endogenous variables were planned: Two mediators, namely, the Formalism and Emotionalism assessments, and five dependent variables, that is, the Five MFs (Graham et al., 2011). Diagonally Weighted Least Squares (DWLS) was chosen as the estimator for two orders of reasons: First, to be safer with respect to multivariate normality assumptions¹; second, as we employed ordinal data (i.e., Likert scales), DWLS, an estimation method specifically designed for ordinal data (Li, 2016), has been proved to provide “more accurate parameter estimates, and the fit of the model is more robust to variable type and non-normality” (Mîndrilă, 2010, p. 65). As for the mediation hypotheses, we recurred to the transmittal approach (Memon, Cheah, Ramayah, Ting, & Chuah, 2018; Rungtusanatham, Miller, & Boyer, 2014) to compute direct and indirect effects together. To establish mediation, we resorted to the guidelines and classification by Zhao, Lynch, and Chen (2010, p. 200). According to these authors, three kinds of mediation exist; namely:

Complementary mediation: Mediated effect (a × b) and direct effect (c) both exist and point in the same direction.

Competitive mediation: Mediated effect (a × b) and direct effect (c) both exist and point in opposite directions.

Indirect-only mediation: Mediated effect (a × b) exists, but no direct effect.

Each latent variable was estimated through the relative items described in the Measures section. An item parceling procedure (Kim & Hagtvet, 2003) was executed to calculate the measurement indicators for Musical Expertise. More specifically, item parceling is a method that unifies the items of a measurement tool into a smaller set of items to reduce the dimensionality and the number of parameters being estimated in the model, resulting in a more parsimonious measurement model and more stable parameter estimates (Little, Rhemtulla, Gibson, & Schoemann, 2013). The item parcels for each latent variable were created by randomly grouping the items regarding the Expertise into three separate item sets (parcels) and by averaging the item scores within each set.

The model had good-to-excellent fit measures: RMSEA = .038 95% CI [.029, .046]; SRMR = .064; CFI = .969; χ²/df = 1.38. All of the latent variables had satisfactory levels of saturation, indicating that they were accurately measuring their respective constructs. However, we did encounter one indicator with a low loading (i.e., β = .20), namely, the second moral judgment indicator of the Authority MF. We believe that this may be due to the particular nature of that item, which is “Men and women each have different roles to play in society.” This result is not surprising. Similar low loadings for the same item have been found in recent studies on the structural validity of MFQ in Western samples such as Sweden (Nilsson & Erlandsson, 2015) and UK (Harper & Rhodes, 2021). Furthermore, the first formulation of the MFQ items dates back to 2008 (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2008); since then, Western society has undergone profound changes in the perception of sex roles. Thus, one might claim that considering men and women as having equal roles in society is an item that could now receive high scores even in Authority-oriented individuals.

Expertise, Musical Experience, and MFs

The first noticeable finding of the model is that, as hypothesized, Musical Expertise per se (i.e., direct effect) negatively predicts the scores of the three hierarchicalizing/binding MFs, namely, Ingroup (β = −0.40 95% CI [ − 0.62, − 0.18] SE = 0.10 p < .001), Authority (β = −0.32 95% CI [ − 0.50, − 0.17] SE = 0.09 p < .001), and Purity (β = −0.30 95% CI [ − 0.44, − 0.16] SE = 0.08 p < .001). Not surprisingly, expertise also predicts both Formalism (β = 0.47 95% CI [0.35, 0.59] SE = 0.03 p < .001) and Emotionalism (β = 0.13 95% CI [0.05, 0.21] SE = 0.02 p = .001), although with a major tendency in favor of the former. Interestingly, Emotionalism is a good predictor of both the horizontalizing MFs, that is, Harm (β = 0.49 95% CI [0.19, 0.80] SE = .23 p < .001) and fairness (β = 0.60 95% CI [0.24, 0.95] SE = 0.34 p = .003). Indeed, the analysis of the indirect effects reveals that the paths connecting Expertise to Harm and Expertise to Fairness mediated by Emotionalism are both significant: Expertise → Emotionalism → Harm: αβ = 0.07 95% CI [0.01, 0.13] SE = 0.02 p = .025; Expertise → Emotionalism → Fairness: αβ = .08 95% CI [0.01, 0.15] SE = 0.03 p = .023. Crucially, as both the direct paths connecting Expertise to Harm and Fairness are not significant (β = p = .690 and p = .727), this implies that Emotionalism is a complete mediator. In Zhao et al. (2010, p. 201) classification, such a pattern is defined as indirect-only mediation. The covariance between formalism and emotionalism was positive and significant (β = 0.63 95% CI [0.41, 0.84] SE = 0.02 p < .001).

Discussion

The model confirmed the veracity of our hypotheses in several manners. For a start, it supports the idea that the mere fact of being involved in extensive classical music listening and training might constitute an obstacle to the proclivity toward what we call the hierarchicalizing (traditionally known as “binding”) MFs (i.e., direct effects); namely, major concerns for the respect for authorities (H₁), ingroup preference (H₂), and purity defense (H₃).

Furthermore, the model points out that, although mere musical expertise does not predict an increase in the horizontalizing (traditionally known as “individualizing”) MFs directly (H₄ and H₅), it does exactly so through emotionally involving music listening (i.e., mediated effects). In fact, the more emotionalist way of experiencing music per se is able to predict higher horizontalizing values, and musical expertise predicts emotionalism positively and significantly. Such a result might be regarded as a satisfying confirmation of H₆, namely, Spencer's (mediation) hypothesis according to which music should lead to compassion and kind behavior due to the fact that listeners experience a wide range of emotions. As expected, coherently with the emotional nature of music's influence on morality, the formalist way of experiencing music had no role in affecting moral tendencies.

When looking closely at the effects of musical expertise on moral tendencies, a few words need to be added to discuss how differently music impacts the hiearchicalizing and horizontalizing MFs. As mentioned above, music's effect on the horizontalizing MFs is completely mediated by emotionalism (H₆). Conversely, music's negative impact on the hierarchicalizing MFs is direct and no mediations have been found. This means that such a decreasing trend might not stem from the broader range of emotions that in Spencer's view are experienced by those who practice and listen to music to a greater extent. One could speculate that the directedness of the effect could be due to mechanisms connected with music expertise that goes beyond mere emotion, such as personality traits. For instance, it is well-established that compared to non-musicians, musicians tend to score higher in Big 5 trait Openness to experience, and lower in the trait Conscientiousness (Gjermunds, Brechan, Johnsen, & Watten, 2020; Kuckelkorn, de Manzano, & Ullén, 2021; Rose, Jones Bartoli, & Heaton, 2019; Vaag, Sund, & Bjerkeset, 2018); indeed, such a personality profile per se leans in the direction of opposition against the hierarchicalizing MFs.

Despite the globally satisfying results, we are aware of a number of caveats and limitations that need to be mentioned. First, despite the model we used being intrinsically apt and capable of formalizing and implementing causal inference tasks (Bollen & Pearl, 2013; Pearl, 2012), no statistical methodology exists that can determine causality in and of itself (Bullock, Harlow, & Mulaik, 1994). In particular, the theoretical position for which people with certain moral attitudes could be more inclined to listen to or play classical music remains in play. In simpler terms, the direction of the causality path might as well be reversed: is it that one who practices music becomes compassionate? Or rather those who are compassionate tend to start music practice? Unfortunately, although one could speculate about some resource-intensive longitudinal studies that might assess moral tendencies and musical expertise during the growth phase of children, to the best of our knowledge, it is fairly hard to conceive an experiment that could unambiguously settle this issue, as, clearly, manipulations can hardly be exploited.

As a second point, in this first and tentative study, we operationalized Musical Expertise in a fairly broad sense, by merging together listening and practising activities; this was done because, in our view, one cannot strictly discern whether the fellow-feeling fostered by music is due to one or both the activities, and, possibly, to what extent each one contributes. Nevertheless, a follow-up of the current study might disentangle the two aspects by taking into consideration four quadrants of music users; namely, non-musicians with great listening activity, musicians with great listening activity, non-musicians with scarce listening activity, and, if possible, musicians with scarce listening activity beyond the pieces they must listen to for work purposes.

This might also help to determine what, in music, can refine your morality: is it the habit of self-discipline that you necessarily must learn to practise effectively? (as a matter of fact, willpower and attitude to sacrifice might be seen as “moral virtues” that are developed by the need to practise for long hours every day). Is it the sensitivity you must acquire to your partners’ movements and feelings in playing in an ensemble that finally makes you more empathetic to others in general? Or would it be the circumstance of playing/singing in little democratic societies such as choirs, ensembles, and orchestras? It is certainly necessary, after discovering certain correlations, to understand what are the causal chains that may lead from music to morality. And, while these two paths might only count for music players, which devices might instead be at work for music listeners?

Lastly, we operationalized morality by embracing MFT, thus implying moral pluralism, de facto; however, in spite of its undeniable allure, other authors claim that such a theory is not the only possible way of conceptualizing morality. On the one hand, the pluralist account has been variously criticized (see Kohlberg, 1971a, 1971b); on the other, the specificities of the MFT are not completely immune to criticisms; for instance, the issues of nativism and cultural learning remain controversial (for such criticisms and the MFT proponents’ relative answers, see Graham et al., 2013).

Conclusion

This work is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt at providing empirical support to the Ethos Theory of Music, as it was presented by Spencer (1864), stating that music listening and expertise enhance human fellow feelings. We did so by exploiting the concepts and tools of MFT, a theory of morality that outlines two main types of moral motivations people stick to in their moral reasoning and action, the hierarchicalizing and the horizontalizing ones. The results of our study demonstrate that, while people's musical expertise correlates with a reduced proclivity for the hierarchicalizing MFs, it seems to increase the importance people attribute to the horizontalizing ones: just as music seems to be a solely human activity, the kind of moral motives it favors are those most typically developed in the human species; and the link between them holds insofar as people live music in all the richness of its emotional potential. We take these results to provide some initial support for Spencer's hypothesis, but we are aware that this is only a first and tentative step towards the confirmation of the ETM. We look forward to developing experiments that can test more accurately the suggestion that listening to other genres of highly expressive music can shape listeners’ characters and enhance their capacity for fellow feeling. We hope that other researchers will also take up the challenge of testing the ETM.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-art-10.1177_02762374231180393 - Supplemental material for Ethos Theory of Music: Toward An Empirical Confirmation Through Moral Foundations Theory

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-art-10.1177_02762374231180393 for Ethos Theory of Music: Toward An Empirical Confirmation Through Moral Foundations Theory by Alessandro Ansani, Lisa Giombini, Isabella Poggi, and James O. Young in Empirical Studies of the Arts

Footnotes

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) site via this link: https://osf.io/ae6sc/

Ethics Statement

The study adheres to the ethical principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki and all participants have been treated with respect and dignity. Informed consent has been obtained from all participants and their rights to privacy and confidentiality are protected. Participants had the right to withdraw from the study at any time without any negative consequences. The questionnaire has been designed to ensure that all questions are respectful and appropriate, and participants were informed of the purpose of the study.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Alessandro Ansani

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author Biographies

Alessandro Ansani, PhD in Psychology and Cognitive Science, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Roma Tre University. His main research investigates the role of music in the interpretation of audiovisuals, focusing on mechanisms such as persuasion, empathy, attention (eye-tracking and pupillometry), memory, and time perception. Additionally, his research interests encompass Psychometrics, Moral Psychology, and Face perception.

Lisa Giombini, PhD in Philosophy, is a Visiting Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire and a Research Fellow in Aesthetics at Roma Tre University, where she teaches Musical Aesthetics. Her research interests involve Philosophy of Music, Philosophy of Art Restoration and Conservation, Everyday Aesthetics, Environmental Aesthetics, and Ethics of Cultural Heritage.

Isabella Poggi, former Professor at Roma Tre University and member of the European Networks of Excellence on Embodied Communication, Emotions, and Social Signal Processing, teaches Psychology of Emotions and Multimodal Communication. Her research, applying a cognitive science approach, focuses on social interaction, emotions, and multimodality, ranging from deception to political communication, from gesture, gaze, and interjections, to social emotions and music.

James O. Young, FRSC, is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, specializing in Philosophy of Art and Language. His research explores truth theories, the realist-anti-realist debate, music philosophy, art's role in knowledge, and ethical questions. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received the 2022 David H. Turpin Gold Medal for Research. His most recent book is A History of Western Philosophy of Music (Cambridge, 2023).

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