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Article 1
The Psychology of Musical Preferences
What do your musical preferences say about your personality?
Published on January 14, 2011 by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Ph.D. in Mr. Personality

How is it then that our musical preferences come to reveal our inner thoughts
and feelings? The answer is really quite simple, namely that music fulfils three
important psychological functions. Indeed, scientific research shows that people
listen to music in order to: (a) improve their performance on certain tasks (music
helps us combat boredom and achieve our optimal levels of attention while driving,
studying or working); (b) stimulate their intellectual curiosity (by concentrating and
analysing the music we hear); and, most importantly (c) manipulate or influence
their own emotional states with the goal of achieving a desired mood state, e.g.,
happiness, excitement, and sadness.
Given that mood states are closely related to our personality (in fact,
personality is to climate what mood is to weather), and given that people use music
for emotional regulation, a scientific understanding of musical preferences should
provide the perfect window into a person's soul.
And yet, few robust links between personality and musical preferences have
been identified so far. In fact, most findings are far from counter-intuitive (e.g.,
aggressive people like Heavy Metal, clever people like Jazz and Classical, rebellious
people like Hip Hop and Rock), which suggests that you do not need to be a
personality expert to understand the psychology of music. Ask laypeople to provide
an informal profile of someone based on their favourite playlist and they will
probably be as accurate as the best psychometric test. As a matter of fact, most
people do this already: when we first visit someone's home we make instant
judgment of that person's personality based on his or her DVD and CD collection,
books, etc - these judgments are really quite accurate.
Why, then, is the science of musical preferences not superior to common
sense? The answer is that almost every study conducted to date has classified
musical preferences according to established musical genres, but such categories
have no psychological value at all. Indeed, musical genres are there to describe
music, not people. In line, three important points should be noted:
1) Most people listen to a wide range of musical genres, especially now that music
has become more accessible (cheap downloads, free streaming, easy sharing,
youtube videos, etc).
2) The choice of a particular musical genre is driven mostly by our social identity
(e.g., if you think of yourself as an intellectual you will like Jazz or Classical, if you
see yourself as a rebel you will like Rock or Heavy Metal, although preference for
Rock and Heavy Metal is more common today in middle aged IT programmers than
in youth in revolt, and the intellectuals of tomorrow will probably listen to 50cc and

Jay Z). Thus, age, sex, and socio-economic status are more relevant than
personality when it comes to explaining any genre-based preferences.
c) The major function of music is emotional, but psychologists have yet to
understand the connections between different songs and different emotions. This is
a major task, not least because of the amount of music that exists.
In order to overcome the limitations of past research, and advance our
scientific understanding of musical preferences, we have developed the first online
Music-based Personality Profiler and Music Discovery tool. Our ambitious goal is to
map the most comprehensive catalogue of music onto different human emotions.
Rather than assuming that certain connections exist, our understanding of music
will be based entirely on what you feel, making this the first user-generated
classification of music.
Article 2
Music and Personality
What Does Your Taste In Music Reveal About Your Personality?
By Kendra Cherry, About.com Guide
Could the playlists lurking on your iPod really reveal information about your
personality? Research conducted by psychologists Jason Rentfrow and Sam Gosling
suggests that knowing the type of music you listen to can actually lead to
surprisingly accurate predictions about your personality.
For example, researchers found that people could make accurate judgments
about an individual's levels of extraversion, creativity and open-mindedness after
listening to ten of their favorite songs. Extraverts tend to seek out songs with heavy
bass lines, while those who enjoy more complex styles such as jazz and classical
music tend to be more creative and have higher IQ-scores.
Another study conducted by researchers at Heriot-Watt University looked at
more than 36,000 participants from all over the world. Participants were asked to
rate more than 104 different musical styles in addition to offering information about
aspects of their personality. The following are just some of the personality traits
linked to certain musical styles.
Pop
Do you prefer to listen to the top 40 hits? Do the latest tracks from Rhianna,
Selena Gomez and Flo Rida make up your workout mix? If so, chances are that you
also tend to be extraverted, honest and conventional. While pop music lovers are
hard-working and have high self-esteem, researchers suggests that they tend to be
less creative and more uneasy.
Rap and Hip/Hop

Are Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre more your style? In spite of the stereotype that
rap lovers are more aggressive or violent, researchers have actually found no such
link. Rap fans do tend to have high self-esteem and are usually outgoing.
Country
Would you rather watch CMT instead of MTV? Country music fans are typically
hardworking, conventional and outgoing. While country songs are often centered on
heartbreak, people who gravitate towards this genre tend to be very emotionally
stable.
Rock / Heavy Metal
Despite the sometimes aggressive image that rock music and heavy metal
project, researchers found that fans of this style of music are usually quite gentle.
They tend to be creative, but are often introverted and may suffer from low selfesteem.
Indie
Do you love seeking out obscure bands and indie artists? Fans of the indie
genre are typically introverted, intellectual and creative. According to researchers,
they also tend to be less hard-working and less gentle. Passivity, anxiousness and
low self-esteem are other common personality characteristics.
Dance
Do you love the fast-paced rhythms of dance music? According to
researchers, people who prefer dance music are usually outgoing and assertive.
Classical
Classical music lovers are typically more introverted, but are also at ease with
themselves and the world around them. They are creative and have a good sense of
self-esteem.
Jazz, Blues and Soul
People who enjoy jazz, blues or soul music were found to be more extraverted
with high self-esteem. They also tend to be very creative, intelligent and at ease.
According to researcher Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh,
UK, the reason people sometimes feel defensive about their taste in music might be
related to how much it relates to attitudes and personality. "People do actually
define themselves through music and relate to other people through it but we
havent known in detail how music is connected to identity," he explained.
The next time you are putting together a playlist to listen to during your
commute or workout, consider how your personality might be reflected in your song
choices.

Article 3
New research from around the world suggests that an individuals favorite
music genre is closely linked to his or her personality.
Professor Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK, has
undertaken the largest study so far of musical tastes and personality type. He is an
expert on music psychology and has carried out extensive research on the social
and applied psychology of music, in particular the relationship between pop music
culture and deviant behavior in adolescence, music and consumer behavior, and the
role of musical preference in everyday life.
Over the course of three years, Professor North asked more than 36,000
people in more than 60 countries to rate a wide range of musical styles in order of
preference. Certain aspects of personality were also measured by questionnaire.
The results showed:

Blues fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle and at ease
Jazz fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing and at ease
Classical music fans have high self-esteem, are creative, introvert and at ease
Rap fans have high self-esteem and are outgoing
Opera fans have high self-esteem, are creative and gentle
Country and western fans are hardworking and outgoing
Reggae fans have high self-esteem, are creative, not hardworking, outgoing,
gentle and at ease
Dance fans are creative and outgoing but not gentle
Indie fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard working, and not
gentle
Bollywood fans are creative and outgoing
Rock/heavy metal fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard-working,
not outgoing, gentle, and at ease
Chart pop fans have high self-esteem, are hardworking, outgoing and gentle,
but are not creative and not at ease
Soul fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle, and at ease

North said he wanted to study why music is such a significant part of peoples
identity.
People do actually define themselves through music and relate to other
people through it but we havent known in detail how music is connected to
identity, he said. We have always suspected a link between music taste and
personality. This is the first time that weve been able to look at it in real detail. No
one has ever done this on this scale before.

People may define their musical identity by wearing particular clothes, going
to certain pubs, and using certain types of slang. So its not so surprising that
personality should be related to musical preference. We really got the sense that
people were selecting musical styles to like that match their own personality, North
said.
He believes that his results show why people can get defensive about what
they like to listen to, as it is likely to be profoundly linked to their outlook on life. The
study also demonstrates the tribal function of musical taste that can explain why
people often bond over music.
North noted that classical and heavy metal music both attracts listeners with
similar personalities but dissimilar ages. Younger members of the personality group
apparently go for heavy metal, while their older counterparts prefer classical.
However, both have the same basic motivation: to hear something dramatic and
theatrical, a shared love of the grandiose, he said.
The general public has held a stereotype of heavy metal fans being
suicidally depressed and being a danger to themselves and society in general, he
said, but they are quite delicate things. Aside from their age, theyre basically the
same kind of person [as a classical music fan]. Lots of heavy metal fans will tell you
that they also like Wagner, because its big, loud and brash. Theres also a sense of
theater in both heavy rock and classical music, and I suspect that this is what
theyre really trying to get at when they listen.
Article 4
What Does Your Music Say About You?
I went to a high school at a time (one not that different from most others, I
imagine) when musical preferences were a good clue to social group membership.
There were, for example, the punks who listened to, well, punk; the stoners who
listened to Pink Floyds The Wall over and over and over again; the hipsters, who
listened to what was the hip music of the time (grunge); and the popular kids who
listened to pop, pop rock, and country (I went to high school in Nashville, where
country music was the popular music). We all assumed that what a person listened
to could tell you a lot about who they were, and it wasnt uncommon for the
question, So, what sort of music do you listen to? to be one of the first asked upon
meeting someone new. It turns out our assumption was probably right. Peoples
musical preferences good indicators of their personality make up. At least, thats the
finding of research coming out of the lab of social psychologist Sam Gosling, of
animal personality fame.
Gosling is not new to intuitively plausible personality research. Hes found, for
example, that peoples personality judgments based only on observing a persons
bedroom or obvious are pretty accurate1, which fits with my experience of people
accurately judging my personality based only on the fact that my desk looks like it
has been hit by an F5 tornado. In the last few years, hes turned to music, with the
following goals2:

The fundamental question guiding our research program is, Why do people
listen to music? Although the answer to this question is undoubtedly complex and
beyond the scope of a single article, we attempt to shed some light on the issue by
examining music preferences. In this research we take the first crucial steps to
developing a theory of music preferencesa theory that will ultimately explain when,
where, how, and why people listen to music. (p. 1236)
It turns out that, despite the fact that most of us believe that musical
preferences say something about who we are, social psychologists havent really
been all that interested in studying music. Rentfrow and Gosling write
At this very moment, in homes, offices, cars, restaurants, and clubs around
the world, people are listening to music. Despite its prevalence in everyday life,
however, the sound of music has remained mute within social and personality
psychology. Indeed, of the nearly 11,000 articles published between 1965 and 2002
in the leading social and personality journals, music was listed as an index term (or
subject heading) in only seven articles. (p. 1236)
Seven articles! This simply will not do (I should note that cognitive
psychologists have been studying the hell out of music for some time, cause we get
people). So Rentfrow and Gosling start down the road to remedying this by looking
at the relationship between individual differences in musical preferences and
personality traits.
They started off by looking at peoples beliefs about the importance of music
in peoples everyday lives. To do this, they gave university undergrads
questionnaires that asked them to rate the importance of various activities,
including listening to music, to indicate how often they participated in those
activities, and to rate how much those activities said about themselves and other
people. As you can see from the graph below (Rentfrow and Goslings Figure 3),
participants believed that music revealed as much or more about themselves and
others than other activities. In act, hobbies were the only types of activities that
revealed as much about people as their musical preferences.
Now confident that people really do use musical preferences as indicators of
personal qualities, Rentfrow and Gosling next sought to map out the dimensions of
those preferences. They started by identifying different musical genres, using a
free-association task with five judges, and then getting more information from
music stores. This process yielded 80 different musical genres, which were then
divided into fourteen, with 66 subgenres. Using these genres and subgenres,
Rentfrow and Gosling developed a questionnaire they called the Short Test of
Musical Preferences, or STOMP, which they gave to participants along with several
personality measures. Participants also completed the STOMP a second time three
weeks after their first testing, to measure the tests retest reliability.
The STOMP results were fed into a factor analysis, which yielded four factors,
or dimensions, of musical preferences. Rentfrow and Gosling labeled these
dimensions Reflective and Complex, which included the genres blues, jazz,
classical, and folk; Intense and Rebellious, which included rock, alternative, and

heavy metal; Upbeat and Conventional, including country, sound tracks, religious,
and pop; and Energetic and Rhythmic, including rap and hip/hop, soul and funk,
as well as electronica and dance. The correlations between these factors from the
first testing and the retesting were high (between .77 and .82), indicating that
STOMP and its resulting factors were reliable. Subsequent testing with more diverse
samples (the original sample was comprised entirely of university undergrads)
indicated that the factors were generalizable as well.
Finally, they looked at the correlation between the different dimensions of
musical preferences and different personality traits using several different measures
of personality, including the Big Five Index, tests of social dominance, and tests of
communication styles. The results indicated that the different dimensions of musical
preferences do in fact correlate with different personality features. Heres a
summary of the results (from pp. 1248-1249):
Reflective and Complex: positively correlated with openness to experience,
self-perceived intelligence, verbal ability, emotional stability, and political
liberalism. Negatively correlated with social dominance orientation, political
conservatism, wealth, and athleticism.
Intense and Rebellious: positively correlated with openness to experience,
extroversion,
athleticism,
self-perceived
intelligence,"social
dominance
orientation, and verbal ability.
Upbeat and Conventional: positively correlated with extraversion, agreeableness,
conscientiousness, self-esteem, political conservatism, physical attractiveness (selfperceived), wealth, and athleticism. Negatively correlated with emotional stability,
openness to experience, social dominance orientation, depression, political
liberalism, intelligence, and verbal ability.
Energetic and Rhythmic: Positively correlated with extraversion, agreeableness,
political liberalism, physical attractiveness, and athleticism. Negatively correlated
with social dominance orientation and political conservatism.
In short, people who listen to jazz are smart, liberal, adventurous, and poor;
people who listen to heavy metal are smart, liberal, adventurous, athletic, and
prone to social dominance; people who listen to Madonna or the Dancing With
Wolves soundtrack are agreeable, conscientious, conservative, rich, happy, dumb,
emotionally unstable, and hot; and people who listen to hip hop are extraverted,
agreeable, liberal, athletic, and hot. Well, those are the tendencies at least (Ive
known some smart Madonna fans, though I have to say that they were pretty
emotionally unstable).
Having established that musical preferences do reveal information about
personality differences, Rentfrow and Gosling conducted a set of follow up studies
designed to look at whether and how people actually use information about musical
preferences to make personality judgments3. First, they looked at whether people
talk about music when getting to know each other. To do this, they used the
following method with college undergrads:
Participants were introduced to a study of how individuals get to know one
another over the Internet. Each was instructed to interact with another participant
for 6 weeks using an on-line bulletin-board system. Half the participants were

assigned to same-sex pairs, and half to opposite-sex pairs. Participants were given
no specific instructions about what to talk about. Instead, they were encouraged to
talk about anything that they thought would enable them to get to know one
another.
As you can see, it wasnt until the sixth week of the participants interactions
that the amount of talk about all of the other activities combined equaled the
amount of talk about music. Clearly, then, people are bringing up music a lot when
theyre getting to know someone, indicating that they believe it will tell people
about themselves. But are our perceptions based on musical preferences accurate?
To determine this, Rentfrow and Gosling had 74 undergrads provide a list of their top
ten favorite songs. A second set of participants was then asked to rate the first set
of participants on several personality dimensions, based solely on listening to the
individuals ten favorite songs. These ratings were then compared to the first set of
participants scores on the same personality dimensions. The correlations between
self-ratings and the observers (whod only listened to their favorite songs!) ranged
between .11 and .38 for each of the Big Five personality dimensions, with all but
one of the correlations (emotional stability) being .27 or above. In other words,
personality judgments based solely on musical preferences were pretty damn
accurate. Thats impressive!
There you have it, then. Social psychologists (two of them, at least) have
jumped head first into the waters of music research, learning that our music says a
lot about who we are, and that we can make pretty accurate judgments about what
people are like based solely on the music they like. I now feel somewhat less guilty
about not being friends in high school with people who listened to country music.
We probably wouldnt have gotten along, cause our personalities would have
clashed.
Research Study
Title: The Do Re Mis of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of
Music Preferences
Researchers: Peter J. Rentfrow and Samuel J. Gosling
Abstract of theStudy:
The present research examined individual differences in music preferences. A
series of 6 studiesinvestigated lay beliefs about music, the structure underlying
music preferences, and the links between music preferences and personality. The
data indicated that people consider music an important aspect of their lives and
listening to music an activity they engaged in frequently. Using multiple samples,
methods, and geographic regions, analyses of the music preferences of over 3,500
individuals converged to reveal 4 music-preference dimensions: Reflective and
Complex, Intense and Rebellious, Upbeat and Conventional, and Energetic and
Rhythmic. Preferences for these music dimensions were related to a wide array of
personality dimensions (e.g., Openness), self-views (e.g., political orientation), and
cognitive abilities (e.g., verbal IQ).

IV.

CONCLUSION
From this research, it is concluded that there is a relationship
between the musical preferences to the personality of a person.
Personality has a big role to play in the formation and maintenance of
music preferences. Music preferences could be used to make self-directed
identity claims. That is, individuals might select styles of music that
reinforce their self-views; for example, individuals may listen to obscure
music to reinforce a self-view of being sophisticated. The findings provide
evidence consistent with this idea: Individuals with a conservative selfviews

preferred

conventional

styles

of

music

(the

Upbeat

and

Conventional dimension), whereas individuals with an athletic self-views


preferred

vigorous

music

(the

Intense

and

Rebellious

dimension).

Moreover, based from the information acquired in the research-making, it


is concluded that individuals who prefer rock music are more aggressive
and rebellious yet are creative.
V.

REFERENCES

Collingwood, J. (2008). Preferred Music Style Is Tied to Personality. Psych


Central.

Retrieved

from

http://psychcentral.com/lib/2008/preferred-

music-style-is-tied-to-personality/
North, A. C., Desborough, L., and Skarstein, L. (2005). Musical preference,
deviance, and attitudes towards celebrities. Personality and Individual
Differences, 38, 1903-1914.
North, A. C. and Hargreaves, D. J. (2008). The social and applied
psychology of music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Premuzic, T. (2011). The Psychology of music preferences. Psychology
Today.

Press.

Retrieved

from

www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mr-

personality/201101/the-psychology-musical-preferences
Rentfrow, P.J., & Gosling, S.D. (2003). The do re mis of everyday life: The
structure and personality correlates of music preferences. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 1236-1256.

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