What is your position in the BBS discussion on the origins of music/ality? [update]

This blog-entry adds some analyses and visualizations related to the topic of the origins of music/ality as discussed in a recent issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS; cf.  Mehr et al., 2021; Savage et al., 2021).

Fig. 1 shows the outcome of a short questionnaire, that was send to the 60 commentary writers in BBS, with the request to rate their own position w.r.t. the two target articles on a five point scale from Strongly Critical to Strongly Supportive (N.B. We received 49 responses):

Fig. 1a: Individual ratings from the BBS Commentary Authors (N=49). Numbers/size show the amount of votes. N.B. An interactive version, linking the individual ratings to the Commentaries, is shown below.

Fig. 1b: Individual ratings from the BBS Commentary Authors (N=49).
Numbers/size: amount of votes; Color: support for one or the other position.
N.B. Click on the figure to run the interactive version, linking the individual ratings to the Commentaries. [Alternative figures, data, and source code at GitHub]

Fig. 2 below shows the rating provided by Savage et al. (2021), where two raters judged the positions of all commentaries on the same two dimensions (but on a continuous scale):

Fig. 2: Ratings from Savage et al. (2021: Figure R1).
[Source code and data at GitHub]

Furthermore, we also did some simple numerical comparisons between the data presented in Fig. 1 and 2. The main observations are:

1. For the Social Bonding hypothesis there is an agreement* between ratings shown in Fig. 1 and those of Fig.2 of .62 (Rater 1/Authors) and .69 (Rater 2/Authors). As such, the raters did a relatively good job in estimating the authors positions. 
2. For the Credible Signalling hypothesis the agreement* was .51 (Rater 1/Authors) and .56 (Rater 2/Authors), suggesting the raters did less well in estimating the authors positions.
   

*Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC). Note that resolution of both ratings (Fig. 1 and 2) differ, which could affect the results.

Fig 3. shows the results on the question whether this two-dimensional representation was considered adequate by the commentary authors:

Fig. 3: In how far are the two dimensions sufficient to capture your position (N=49)? [Alternative figures, data, and source code at GitHub]

[Credits: Visualizations by Bas Cornelissen; Stats by Atser Damsma]

Mehr, S., Krasnow, M., Bryant, G., & Hagen, E. (2021). Origins of music in credible signaling. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, E60. doi:10.1017/S0140525X20000345

Savage, P., Loui, P., Tarr, B., Schachner, A., Glowacki, L., Mithen, S., & Fitch, W. (2021). Music as a coevolved system for social bonding. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, E59. doi:10.1017/S0140525X20000333

Honing, H. (2021). Unravelling the origins of musicality: Beyond music as an epiphenomenon of language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, E78. doi:10.1017/S0140525X20001211