Effect of background music on people's perception of price

By Yiler Huang

This is the experiment I designed to test if background music affects people's perception of price of a dish.

I am instersted in this topic, because the pasta restaurant around the school always plays loud pop or hip hop music. I felt like it made the restaurant feel cheap and sketchy, even though their food are actually decent. I wonder would the condition change if they are playing a different genre of music. Therefore, I designed this experiment.

1. Find a subject
2. Show them videos of pasta, exciting music for control group, jazz music for experimental group
3. Ask them to guess the price of the food
4. Collect data

Control variable: The same videos, same crowd noise

Independent: Jazz or Exciting music

Dependent: How much the subjects think the food cost.

Control group: Exciting music

Experimental group: Jazz

Poeple will guess the one with jazz music is more expensive, because jazz sometimes tied to highly educated or fanciness. This is related to the organization part of the perception, and I want to experiment if a simple change in music could affect their perception and cause them to give different answers.

I am a middle school student and I am running an research. It is only gonna take under a minute.

I will show you a video, you need to imagine you are in a pasta restaurant and there is a dish of pasta in front of you.

*show them the video for 10 second*

*ask them the price, still playing the video*

I want you to guess the price of the pasta.

Thank you very much, this is actually an experiment about perception. I am testing if the music changes your answer about the price of the dish.