Research

Introduction

Shark populations have declined worldwide due to overfishing, finning, and habitat degradation, with a quarter of these and related species now considered to be Threatened with extinction under IUCN criteria.Managing and conserving shark populations relies on public support, which can be difficult to achieve due to the public’s instinctive, yet exaggerated, fear of sharks. This fear, which resonates deeply and viscerally, is validated and reinforced by disproportionate and sensationalistic news coverage of shark ‘attacks’ and by highlighting shark-on-human violence in documentaries. In this study, we investigated another subtler, yet powerful, factor that contributes to negative attitudes toward sharks: the ominous background music that often accompanies shark footage in documentaries.

Background music in visual media engages viewers on an emotional level, sets the mood, and conveys unspoken commentary and judgment. In this study we hypothesized that documentary viewers’ perceptions of sharks would be greatly affected by the background music. In particular, we predicted that when footage of swimming sharks is set to ominous music, viewers would perceive sharks as scarier, more dangerous, and more vicious than when the same footage is set to uplifting music.

Using experiments that recruited a total of 2181 survey participants, we showed that participants rated sharks more negatively and less positively after watching a 60-second video clip of sharks swimming set to ominous background music, compared to participants who watched the same video clip set to uplifting background music, or silence. This finding was not an artifact of soundtrack alone because attitudes toward sharks did not differ among participants assigned to audio-only control treatments.

This is the first study to demonstrate empirically that the connotative attributes of background music accompanying shark footage affect viewers’ attitudes toward sharks. Given that nature documentaries are often regarded as objective and authoritative sources of information, it is critical that documentary filmmakers and viewers are aware of how the soundtrack can affect the interpretation of the educational content.

For more information, refer to our recent article in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, “The Effect of Background Music in Shark Documentaries on Viewers’ Perceptions of Sharks,” published on August 3, 2016.

Methods and Results

Survey participants were randomly assigned to one of six experimental treatments. Participants in the video treatments saw a 60-second video clip of sharks swimming, set either to uplifting music (V-uplifting), ominous music (V-ominous), or silence (V-silence). Participants in the audio-only treatments listened to the 60-second ominous (A-ominous) or uplifting audio clip alone (A-uplifting), or waited in silence for 60 seconds (A-silence). Participants in the video treatments were instructed to ‘watch the following documentary excerpt,’ while those in the A-uplifting and A-ominous treatments were instructed to ‘listen to the following musical excerpt.’ We informed participants in the A-silence treatment that ‘the next page takes approximately one minute to load’ and asked them to ‘wait patiently.’ After completing this part of the experiment, participants answered a series of questions that measured their perceptions of sharks.

To measure their attitudes toward sharks, participants were asked to indicate to what extent they thought each of six words capturing negative (scary, dangerous, vicious) and positive (peaceful, beautiful, graceful) associations describe sharks. Participants rated each adjective on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much). We also asked participants to ‘write one additional word in the space below, other than those listed above, that you would use to describe sharks.’ Two research assistants, blind to the experimental objectives and design, independently coded participants’ free-response adjectives as either positive, negative, neutral, or unknown. A simple valence metric was calculated by coding positive adjectives as 1, negative adjectives as -1, and neutral adjectives as 0 (unknown adjectives were omitted).