Does prosocial attitude affect creativity in musical improvisation?

Disciplinary background A. Statement of background in Psychology of Creativity: Organizational psychology has demonstrated the importance of social dynamics for group creativity (Hennessey et al., 2020). Prosocial attitudes, e.g., feeling close to each other, can affect joint creativity in different ways (Oztop et al., 2018). It remains unclear whether such findings can be applied to other domains, such as music. Disciplinary background B. Statement of background in Musical Improvisation: Musical improvisation research includes descriptive analyses, as well as investigations based on quantitative methodologies. And although musical improvisation is often participatory, the social dynamics at the heart of such an activity have rarely been addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together both approaches. Abstract The present research aims to shed light on how intra-group social dynamics shape creative musical improvisation, examining the perspectives of both improvisers and external raters. To study the impact of prosocial attitude in musical improvisation, we implemented a quasi-social improvisation task (done remotely), in which novices were invited to improvise with a virtual avatar (i.e., a moving stick-figure drummer hitting a cymbal in synchrony with a backing track). Using a virtual improvisation partner ensured comparability of outcomes; and to further reduce the variance among participants we kept the baseline of expertise consistent by only recruiting novices. Furthermore, it has been shown that prosocial attitude towards a virtual partner can increase through an imagined synchronization task (Stupacher et al., 2020). Based on this finding we demonstrated in a preliminary study (n = 65) that an overt synchronization task with the virtual drummer can increase prosocial attitude, assessed through felt closeness. Building on this research, the present empirical study involved two experimental phases: in the first phase (“improvisation”), 18 novices were invited to improvise in three conditions, each starting with a priming task. In condition 1 a neutral prime was used to not alter prosocial attitude; in condition 2 participants had to synchronously move with a black dot to a metronome, which allowed to control