May 2005

Sound of Silence

When I first read the article on the Mozart effect, I felt bad for a pregnant friend. There is no evidence to support a widespread rumor that playing classical music makes babies smarter, the research report says. My friend, 7 months pregnant at the time, had begun playing classical music to her unborn child.

Knowing she had spent a sizeable sum on a CD series especially marketed to relatives of babies, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I worked with a professor who concluded the claims were bogus. It’s nearly impossible to prove a negative, I thought, so I can’t guarantee her the music doesn’t work the way she thinks, and because of her investment, she will be predisposed to not believe me. The conversation might end our friendship, and besides, I rationalized, my friend (who previously spent her discretionary cash on rock concerts) might need some new music to help her rest.

I felt a little duplicitous concealing this information from her, however. As someone in the business of spreading stories that are supposed to be more factual than fictional, I realized I would have rushed to tell her if the professor said playing the music to her baby worked. This is one of the complexities of communication, mass marketed or personal, that Professor Chip Heath is trying to sort out.

As an editor and writer for a mass medium, I also try to sort it out. Experience teaches me that humans are predisposed to hear or read what we want to hear or read and spread what we want to spread. For the same reason that politicians kiss babies but not fourth graders, magazine editors put photographs of celebrities on their covers along with headlines about flat abs, a “Mozart Effect” on babies, and serial murderers. Most aren’t guessing this works—they have sales figures to prove it.

This magazine doesn’t survive on subscription sales and our alumni/ae surveys support our being different, so we have wiggle room to tell you a few things you might not want to hear. In this issue, for some of you that would be the article on executive pay, or perhaps the heretical one about the “irrationality” of voting in democracies, which I find interesting to think about in light of the risks that many Iraqis took to vote earlier this year. Or it might be the story about 25th reunions, where we dare to suggest that post-MBA life includes some difficult losses as well as successes.

In short, we believe that you know—or begrudgingly admit—the creation of new knowledge, whether in a research institution or a business, involves challenging the status quo, sometimes confirming what was believed and sometimes upending it.

In the article on Heath’s research, I was aggravated to learn one state legislature required day care centers to play classical music without a shred of evidence that the music improved the children’s learning. I wanted to chastise the politicians involved, but then, there was the matter of my own unwillingness to spoil a friend’s optimism, which suggests a broader conspiracy. This may be anecdotal but it’s not a rumor: Almost everyone in America believes babies should be kissed.

From the Editor

Dean's Column

Kathleen O'Toole
Editor