Our daily life is lined with background music. Whether it’s while driving, at the gym, at home, or even at work, we often have music playing while we’re doing something else. Research into precisely how this affects our behaviour, emotions and cognitive processes have provided mixed findings, however.

One of the reasons, argue Agustín Perez Santangelo at the University of Buenos Aires and colleagues, is there are so many variables, both in terms of the type of music used in the studies, and also the aspects of performance being measured.

Santangelo’s team decided, therefore, to explore changes in just one musical variable — tempo — and to look for effects on two individual aspects of decision-making: speed and accuracy. And they report in their paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, that background music did indeed have an effect: it made the participants less cautious.

In total, the researchers gathered data on just over 100,000 individual decisions. And the analysis threw up a clear finding. The presence of music vs silence affected performance on all of the tasks. It led participants to make faster and also less accurate decisions.

Interestingly, tempo had no bearing on this: whether the music was fast or slow, this effect was the same.