Kavli Affiliate: Sarah Woolley
| Authors: Mila Bertolo, Daniel Müllensiefen, Isabelle Peretz, Sarah C. Woolley, Jon T. Sakata and Samuel A. Mehr
| Summary:
Since Darwin, researchers have proposed that human musicality evolved in a reproductive context in which males produce music to signal their mate quality to females. Sexually selected traits result from sex differences in the costs of high-quality signal production and high-fidelity signal detection, leading to observable sexual dimorphisms across many species. If musicality is a sexually selected trait in humans, males and females should then differ in their music perception ability, music production ability, or both. The evidence for this possibility is unclear, because previous reports of sex differences in human auditory perception are restricted in scope and inconsistent in direction. Here, we report a test of music processing ability in > 890,000 participants from 208 countries, over a main study and three replication studies. In contrast to other non-musical human traits, and in contrast to music-related traits in non-human animals, we found no consistent advantage in music perception or self-reported music production abilities for either sex. The sex differences we did observe in the main study (n = 554,300) were negligible (Cohen′s d range: 0.009-0.111), and Bayesian analyses of general music perception ability indicated evidence in favor of the null hypothesis of no sex difference (Bayes Factor = 0.6). This pattern of results held over the three replication studies. These results imply that the minds of men and women are largely similar when it comes to musicality, and so it is unlikely that sexual selection played any major role in the evolution of human musicality.