Is Baby Shark an Activist’s Anthem? A review of how background music influences our relationships with sharks
Remember the first time you watched Jaws? How about Jaws 2? Okay, how about Jaws 3? Alexa, play John Williams’ spine tingling movie score — Dahh-na. Dahh-na. Dah-na dah-na dah-na — that’s enough of a description for me to get your heart racing. You probably already know where I am going with this — a deep dive into the ocean, to sharks!
Before, writing this if you asked me, “How do you feel about sharks?” I would’ve probably said “Thank god, I’m not near an ocean.” After this, I feel much more “Meh” about them. Sharks? They exist and we should let them exist. For years now, we have just feared sharks and not really questioned it. Think back to your first memory of an experience with a shark? Your first shark attack? Do you not have one? Hmmmm interesting…then, why do you fear them? Is it because you watched a movie and the shark ate your favorite character? Is it because your only experience with sharks has been with scary musical scores that are heavy on brass, strings, and drums?
Now, one might wonder why should we spend our time thinking about this fear of sharks instilled by musical elements? should it matter to us? how does it impact the world? Well, in simple words- it does!
Environmental conservationists emphasize the alarming reduced support for shark conservation (Dulvy et al., 2014) and about 100 million human-caused annual shark killings (Ferguson, 2006). Moreover, this number has spiked ever since the release of the movie-Jaws (Ferguson, 2006). Although the movie had hit the theaters 44 years ago, Hollywood has not really helped sharks since then, rather has continued to reinforce our fear of sharks as the great predator. For instance, the animated sharks in Finding Nemo(Five-year-old me took several years to fully recover from Bruce’s nightmare inducing grin), Sharknado, Shark Night, and 47 Meters Down just to name a few dramatized media depictions of sharks … All these movies have one common theme- sharks kill. Well, they can, and they do; however, the chances of you getting attacked by a shark are in about one in 3,748,067, but the chances of a dog killing you are about 1 in 34…Who is a man’s best friend, now?
In addition to the development of an irrational fear of sharks, it has been suggested that people are less likely to support and donate money towards shark conservation than other marine animals or even other predators (Càrdenas & Lew, 2016), despite a strong need to maintain a healthy shark population for a balanced and well-functioning ecosystem. Why do we have such a hard time helping sharks, but do not face the same challenges when it comes to helping tigers? What really influences our fear of sharks? Has Hollywood successfully caused us to exclude sharks from our activist agenda?
To answer these questions, a team of researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, developed a series of experiments that deeply investigate how music in shark documentaries influences our perceptions and attitudes towards sharks, and our likelihood of supporting shark related conservation efforts.
To test this idea of how background music plays a role in our feelings and behaviors towards sharks, this group of researchers first randomly divided 616 human subjects to two groups- video treatment and audio treatment. Subjects in the video treatment group were asked to watch a 60-second shark documentary clips that was set with either ‘ominous music’ , ‘uplifting music’, or silence.
On the other hand, the subjects in the audio treatment group were asked to only listen to 60-second clips of either ‘ominous music’, ‘uplifting music’ or sit in silence.
After both groups completed their respective tasks, subjects were asked to share what positive or negative adjectives matched their feelings towards sharks. Then, the participants were asked to answer questions on their willingness to participate in shark conversation efforts. Through this experiment, researchers successfully supported this idea that background music does influence our feelings towards sharks. Specifically, subjects who watched the shark documentary set to scary music rated sharks much more negatively and less positively than those who watched the documentary set to uplifting music or no music. Now you might wonder, “Hmm…what if this was just because the scary music itself was so creepy that it caused people to rate sharks negatively and had nothing to do with sharks?”, I did too. However, this study shows that that is not true, because subjects who just listened to the audio clips and never watched the shark documentary did not have any differences amongst each other on how they rated their feelings towards sharks. So now that we know how movie music has contributed to our feelings towards sharks, I will give us all a minute to apologize to this innocent creature we have bullied over the years. Actually, all innocent sharks, but Bruce from Finding Nemo.
Although the researchers accomplished in establishing this link between background music and our feelings towards sharks, their first experiment failed to show a relationship between background music plays and our willingness to contribute to shark conservation.
…But our scientists did not accept their defeat, rather they decided to make changes to their original set of questions that tested shark conversation efforts and see if this change would bring them successful results. For their second experiment, they worked with 806 selected human subjects. They randomly divided the subjects into two groups. Both groups were subjected to the same 60-second documentary clips that were set to either scary, uplifting, or no music. However, this time, one group was given the same willingness-to-conserve questions as the first experiment and the other group was given a new test question that tested how much money (So not how willing, rather by how much) one will you be willing to donate to a non-profit whose mission is to support shark population. Yet again, their efforts failed. There was no significant difference in the two question-type groups and their conversation efforts. Despite the fails, our scientists were persistent. They wanted to save some sharks, they wanted to help get rid of their bad reputation. So, they tried again….
For the third experiment, they decided to again change how they measured their subjects’ tendency to engage with shark conversation efforts. Unlike experiments 1 & 2, where participants were simply asked will they donate or how much they will donate to shark conversation, this time participants were told that at the end of the study the researchers will donate $100 to one of the following non-profit driven ocean conversation efforts: sharks, dolphins, or discretionary fund. The selected 796 participants were asked to watch the same 60-second documentary clips that were set to either scary, uplifting, or no music. In the end their feelings towards sharks were collected using the same measure in experiment 1 and were then asked to vote for which cause would they like the researcher to donate to- sharks, dolphins, or discretionary funds.
As the old cliché goes- third times a charm, well in this case it was! People were significantly more likely to donate to sharks after watching a shark documentary set to uplifting music than when the video was set to silence or scary music. However, there was no significant negative effects of scary music on shark protection efforts. So, perhaps music does make us fear sharks and right kind of it can help sharks, but it is not the only factor that explains reduced shark conservation and activist efforts.
As I said in the beginning, shark attacks on humans are exceeeeeeeeeeeeeedingly rare! Yet we kill them by the millions — possibly hundreds of millions — each year, and the discussed study definitely suggests that Hollywood and its musical elements are not helping them! So, if changing this musical association, can help sharks and our ecosystem, I would argue that we should all first work towards changing the soundtrack for sharks and then work towards increasing activism and efforts towards shark protection and conservation.
I cannot end this discussion without giving credit to Baby Shark, a nursery rhyme that is amazingly changing the bad reputation we have of sharks. That being said, what soundtrack do you feel would best help our sharks? I feel Beyoncé would definitely attract some shark activism
References
Ferguson, K. (2006). Submerged realities: shark documentaries at depth. Atenea, 26(1), 115–129.
