Beatley Moments | Page 242 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

My Library Link of the Day was an article from the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1…..cuddy.html

Here’s the Beatley reference in it…

To examine how easily the science could be manipulated, Simmons and Simonsohn ran a study in which they asked 20 participants their ages (and their fathers’ birthdays). Half the group listened to the Beatles song “When I’m Sixty-Four”; the other listened to a control (the instrumental music “Kalimba”). Using totally standard methodology common to the field, they were able to prove that the participants who listened to the Beatles song were magically a year and a half younger than they were before they had heard the music.

I read it and was like…what?? So I looked up the study.

Study 2: musical contrast and chronological rejuvenation

Using the same method as in Study 1, we asked 20 University of Pennsylvania undergraduates to listen to either “When I’m Sixty-Four” by The Beatles or “Kalimba.” Then, in an ostensibly unrelated task, they indicated their birth date (mm/dd/yyyy) and their father’s age. We used father’s age to control for variation in baseline age across participants. An ANCOVA revealed the predicted effect: According to their birth dates, people were nearly a year-and-a-half younger after listening to “When I’m Sixty-Four” (adjusted M = 20.1 years) rather than to “Kalimba” (adjusted M = 21.5 years), F(1, 17) = 4.92, p = .040.

I don’t really understand how the study helped them determine what they determined, but I think it is grand that Beatles music was used to improve the reliability of scientific study.

What I gleaned from the NYT article, basically, if you are going to be a social psychologist and do experimental studies using human subjects, don’t P-hack or your published article will go down in flames.