It’s no secret that music and arts festivals can be very fun to attend and are incredibly popular throughout the world. However, a new study conducted by Yale psychologists found that these types of “secular mass gatherings” that emphasize connection and creativity have a bigger impact on attendees than simply providing a few days of fun with friends.
The report, which also included contributions from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Denver and University of Bath in the UK, analyzed the experiences and social behavior of attendees at several festivals in the US and the UK that — Burning Man, Burning Nest, Lightning in a Bottle, Dirty Bird, and Latitude.
The data was collected over a period of five years and included field studies of over 1,200 people as well as pre- and post-event surveys, which allowed researchers to “track relationships between transformative experience and moral orientation over time,” according to the report.
They found that people experienced higher rates of transformative experiences the longer they were onsite, and these transformative experiences persisted for at least six months following the event. On average, 63.2 percent of participants reported being at least “somewhat” transformed by an event, and 19.5 percent indicated that they felt “absolutely” transformed.
Attendees who reported transformative experiences at these events felt more connected to humanity and were more willing to help strangers, a phenomenon the report refers to as moral expansion. To measure this, researchers asked participants to indicate how much free time they would be willing to spend doing a favor for people at different social distances.
The findings indicate that moral expansion “significantly increased with time onsite” — in other words, attendees at these events were willing to spend more time helping more socially distant strangers the longer they spent onsite. The report also notes that there was no noticeable association between transformative experience and age, gender, or income.
“We’ve long known that festivals, pilgrimages, and ceremonies make people feel more bonded with their own group,” said Daniel Yudkin, a postdoctoral researcher and first author of the paper. “Here we show that experiences at secular mass gatherings also have the potential to expand the boundaries of moral concern beyond one’s own group.”
M.J. Crockett, an associate professor of psychology at Yale and leader of the research team added, “Transformative experiences help people transcend the borders of the self and connect with all of humanity — crucial qualities to cultivate as we work to end this pandemic and prevent future ones.”