Prevalence of imagined social interaction is increased by concurrent task-irrelevant music

![CDATA[Background: Evolutionary theories suggest that music’s adaptive significance depends on its ability to generate social bonding (Savage et al., 2021). Undeniably, music has an important presence in many human cultures and contains fundamentally social elements (Cross, 2001). For instance, music-making is linked with prosocial outcomes, such as enhanced interpersonal bonding and establishing social dynamics (MacRitchie et al., 2018; Rabinowitch et al., 2013). However, not only music making, but also music listening may evoke thoughts of social interactions (Cabedo-Mas et al., 2021). Here, we explore whether this is the case, within the context of a mental imagery paradigm. Aims: This study aims to test whether task-irrelevant background music can induce thoughts of social interaction in a mental imagery paradigm. Methods: We analysed 700 free text responses collected from 100 participants in a previous study (Herff et al., 2021), in which participants imagined the continuation of a journey under music and silence conditions. Manual data coding, blind to the experimental condition, was conducted to compare the effects of music and silence on social interaction. Additionally, social interactions involving humans and non-humans and the use of first- and third-person language were annotated to determine whether it varied between music and silence conditions. Results: Bayesian Mixed Effects models revealed strong evidence for greater social interaction in music (M = 0.36, SE = 0.02) relative to silent (M = 0.17, SE = 0.04) imagination conditions (β = 1.47, EEβ = 0.34, Odds(β > 0) > 9999*). No strong evidence of music (M = 0.22, SE = 0.04) versus silent (M = 0.09, SE = 0.03) conditions (β = 0.46, EEβ = 0.69, Odds(β > 0) = 2.97) was found when social interaction was broken down into human and non-human social interactions. There was also no strong evidence between first- and third-person language use between the music (M = 1.33, SE = 0.7) and silence (M = 1.30, SE = 0.7) conditions, (β = 0.46, EEβ = 0.69, Odds(β > 0) = 2.97). Conclusion: This study supports that music can evoke imagery related to social interaction more intensely than silence. It seems, not only does music boost social interactions between individuals (Hove & Risen, 2009), but it also enhances social thought within an individual. Future research is needed to explore how different visual stimuli or additional situational prompts (e.g., verbal instruction) may interact with music to influence the content and nature of imagined social interactions. Moreover, further research is required to establish precisely whether imagined social interactions provide the same — or at least some— of the positive effects that real social interactions provide (Krach et al., 2010; Ybarra et al., 2011).]]