Here’s a good reason for your company to play music at work, or to set up a shared Spotify playlist.   Having music in the background makes you a nicer person….though obviously it depends on what type you are listening to.

That’s the result of two separate studies, one involving toddlers and the other involving adults (restaurant patrons).   German academics Sebastian Kirschner and Michael Tomasello recruited 96 four year olds and got them to play games in pairs.   One of the games involved one child helping the other and children who had previously played music together were more likely to help (via Big Think).

In the forthcoming journal of the International Journal of Hospitality Management there’s another study about to come out about tipping in restaurants.   Apparently if so called music with “pro-social” lyrics (so happy stuff) is played in restaurants, there is a significant increase in tipping behaviour.

So, let your employees play music at work…but have a music monitor or censor weed out anything too depressing.   Here’s a good place to start.

Image – Phil Hilfiker

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In particular, Nielsen looks at the theme that “to adults, cell phones are a communications device. To children, they are a lifelines” – or as Synovate found out recently in a global study, they are increasingly ‘remote controls for life.’

The following chart shows that 13-17 year olds significantly over-index in mobile Internet use when it comes to social networking, music, games and videos / music. At the same time, the average age in which kids first use mobiles / cellphones has gone down over the past year from 8.6 to 8.0 years.

As Nielsen says, “the next time you hear ‘everybody’s got one’, the fact is, that classic ploy may be true.”

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• All-in-one post on all-in-one devices (jamesfallows.theatlantic.com)
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