Recent reports from Finland and Israel make bold claims about the power of music.

The term ‘the power of music’ usually implies positive qualities: its ability to stimulate, motivate, or soothe. But two recent studies may have music lovers worried. They claim that listening to our favourite music may subconsciously increase gambling tendencies and also lead to unethical and uncharacteristic behaviour.

In Finland, Helsinki’s Aalto University conducted a study on a group of teenagers and invited them all to take part in a gambling game. The stakes were low but while doing it, music they liked was played in the background for a quarter of the time, music they disliked for another quarter and for the rest of the time the game was played in silence.

The findings, as reported in the online journal PLoS One, stated that, compared to silence, the sound of their favourite songs increased risk-taking, while listening to the music they didn’t like decreased it. There are no current psychological theories on mood and risk-taking to explain the results but the study suggests that we find the idea of obtaining money more pleasurable if we’re listening to a tune we like, which makes us more likely to take a...