Trent's Exhibition: Thrash Metal and Risk Taking

Maya took a few notes on Trent’s Exhibition.

Trent’s Exhibition was in the “social science” category. He told us at the beginning of his Exhibition that he couldn’t tell us what his project was about, and that if he did than it would ruin the experiment results. So, he split his audience up into two groups, and one would listen to “relaxing classical” music (actually smooth-jazz elevator music), and the other would listen to heavy metal music. 

After we took about two minutes to separate into different rooms and listened to different music, we played a game with a die, where the object is to get a high number on the die: then, you get more of the toy money that Trent had provided; and if you wanted to, then you could roll a second time for a higher number--which was a risk, because you could lose the money you got on the first roll.

His experiment turned out to be “Do people who listen to less relaxing music take more risks?” In the end, the people who listened to heavy metal music did end up taking more risks in the game, but Trent announced at the end that he couldn’t make any official decisions since he had such a small audience. (Some of us also observed that we were enraged by listening to Muzak.) The Exhibition was very engaging, people had a great time and understood what we were doing: overall, the Exhibition was successful.