Simulation – imagining future events – plays a role in decision-making. In Conviction Narrative Theory, people's emotional responses to their simulations inform their choices. Yet imagining one possible future also increases its plausibility and accessibility relative to other futures. We propose that the act of simulation, in addition to affective evaluation, drives people to choose in accordance with their simulations.

To corroborate the music and social bonding hypothesis, we propose that future investigations isolate specific components of social bonding and consider the influence of context. We deconstruct and operationalize social bonding through the lens of social psychology and provide examples of specific measures that can be used to assess how the link between music and sociality varies by context.

Although many simulations draw upon only one level of abstraction, the process for generating rich simulations requires a dynamic interplay between abstract and concrete knowledge. A complete model of simulation must account for a mind and brain that can bridge the perceptual with the conceptual, the episodic with the semantic, and the concrete with the abstract.