Before heading out to an important job interview, listening to 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” could give people a competitive advantage over other applicants: you’ll get confidence. In a study published by The Society for Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that bass-heavy music such as “In Da Club” made people feel more confident before going into job interviews.

Researchers Dennis Y. Hsu, Li Huang, Loran F. Nordgren, Derek D. Rucker and Adam D. Galinsky tested “high-power” or bass-heavy songs as well as “low-power” songs on subjects. Among the “high-power” tracks, they tested were “In Da Club,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and 2 Unlimited’s “Get Ready For This”. Meanwhile, they chose Notorious B.I.G.’s “Big Poppa,” Fatboy Slim’s “Because We Can,” and Baha Men’s “Who Let The Dogs Out?” as “low-power” tracks. Researchers found that “high-power” songs could inspire people to make good impressions at job interviews, while listening to “low-power” songs made test subjects feel meeker and score lower on a test that required the use of abstract thinking.

“Just as professional athletes might put on empowering music before they take the field to get them in a powerful state of mind, you might try this in certain situations where you want to be empowered,” said Rucker, one of the researchers and a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management.

Researchers selected these songs by first playing them to subjects and asking them to rate the tracks according to their feeling of empowerment. They found the “low-power” songs by playing tracks with similar style as the first set (sports music and hip-hop) and choosing the lowest-rated for empowerment. These songs were then played to an entirely new set of test subjects. The study can be used to determine how music can affect the workplace, advertising or other situations that can benefit from the feeling of empowerment.

Boost Your Confidence. 50 Cent: ‘In Da Club’

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