The Relationship between Music and Decision-Making

Decision-making is one of the most basic cognitive processes of human behavior, and it entails choosing a desired choice or course of action from a list of choices depending on a set of variables. According to prior research, music is a powerful and engaging stimulant that influences decision-making and risk-taking, as well as behavioral decisions (Wang, 2007). The purpose of this experiment is to understand how music affects one’s ability to make an accurate decisions under pressure. Past research has looked at the impact of music tempo and task complexity on multi-attribute decision-making success from two perspectives, arousal which was the inducer vs. the distractor, background music (Day et al., 2009). The aim of this research is to see how different music types affect Westfield State Students’ ability to take Queendom's mental speed test.