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What the Music You Listen to Says About You

a young man smiling outside while listening to music

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Music plays an of import role in the lives of people all over the world, which is why many wonder what individual factors might influence musical preferences. Could the contents of your playlist, for case, reveal something about your personality?

People listen to music every bit a fashion to set the mood, to motivate a workout, or even to gain inspiration. How much are those choices influenced by underlying personality traits?

Personality Traits Linked to Musical Styles

I large-calibration study conducted by researchers at Heriot-Watt Academy looked at more than 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 personalities.

According to the researcher, Adrian North, the reason people sometimes experience defensive about their gustation in music might be related to how much information technology relates to attitudes and personality.

N suggests that people do define themselves through music and utilise it equally a means to relate to other people. His enquiry points to the connection that people often make betwixt who they are as an private and their musical tastes.

Keep in heed that these are the results published in only one report rather than being replicated and validated by a variety of researchers and different study designs. The following are some of the personality traits the study linked to certain musical styles.

Pop Music

Fans of the peak twoscore pop hits tend to exist extroverted, honest, and conventional. While pop music lovers are hardworking and have high self-esteem, researchers suggest that they tend to exist less artistic and more uneasy.

Rap and Hip/Hop Music

In spite of the stereotype that rap lovers are more than ambitious or violent, researchers take actually found no such link. Rap fans do tend to have high cocky-esteem and are usually approachable.

State Music

Country music fans are typically hardworking, conventional, and outgoing. While country songs are frequently centered on heartbreak, people who gravitate towards this genre tend to be very emotionally stable. They also tend to be more conservative and rank lower on the trait of openness to feel.

Rock/Heavy Metal Music

Despite the sometimes aggressive image that rock and heavy metal music project, researchers found that fans of this style of music are usually quite gentle. They tend to exist creative, but are oft introverted and may suffer from low self-esteem.

Indie Music

Fans of the indie genre are typically introverted, intellectual, and artistic. According to researchers, they also tend to exist less hardworking and less gentle. Passivity, anxiousness, and low self-esteem are other mutual personality characteristics.

Dance Music

According to researchers, people who prefer dance music are commonly outgoing and assertive. They besides tend to rank high on the trait of openness to experience, 1 of the five major personality traits. People who prefer fast-paced electronic music also tend to rank low on gentleness.

Classical Music

Classical music lovers are typically more introverted but are also at ease with themselves and the world around them. They are creative and take a good sense of self-esteem.

Jazz, Dejection, and Soul Music

People who savour jazz, blues, or soul music were institute to exist more extroverted with loftier cocky-esteem. They also tend to be very creative, intelligent, and at ease.

What the Research Says

A number of studies have found that musical tastes can actually be good predictors of personality traits, yet not all the research agrees.

Predictions of Personality Traits

Research conducted by psychologists Jason Rentfrow and Sam Gosling suggested that knowing the blazon of music you listen to tin actually lead to surprisingly accurate predictions nearly your personality.

Researchers found that people could brand accurate judgments about an individual's levels of extraversion, inventiveness, and open up-mindedness after listening to 10 of their favorite songs.

Extroverts tend to seek out songs with heavy bass lines while those who enjoy more than complex styles such as jazz and classical music tend to be more than creative and have higher IQ-scores. Rentfrow and Gosling have extended their studies, looking at the dissimilar facets of music that can be linked to preferences.

Music and Cognitive Styles

Another written report found that the types of music you relish may be connected to the means your encephalon processes information. Researchers suggest that there are two ways of responding to the earth: empathizing involves being able to respond to the world based on social cues, while systemizing involves interacting based upon preset conceptions of how people recall they should reply.

In the written report, researchers constitute that people who were empathizers were also more than likely to relish mellow but emotionally-rich contemporary music, which ranged from indie-stone to country to folk. The systemizers, however, were more probable to prefer complex, intense, energetic music that was upbeat and positive.

The systemizers, who researchers suggest tend to follow career paths in math and science, are more fatigued to the structural complexity of the music, ofttimes liking classical, jazz, and world music.

Empathizers, who are often fatigued more to creative careers or those that involve working with people, are more likely to prefer softer music that evokes stiff emotional responses.

Non all inquiry supports the idea that personality traits play a role in determining musical preferences, withal. Ane 2017 meta-analysis found that personality traits played very little of a office in accounting for these individual differences.

Other Factors Also Play a Role

Experts annotation that personality traits alone practice non account for musical preferences. While music is oftentimes an of import way to express self-identity, research has shown that people heed to music for a diverseness of purposes.

I study suggested that some of the key psychological functions that music serves include improving performance, stimulating curiosity and imagination, and amplifying certain moods or emotions. Other factors including gender, age, social form, and cultural background also play important roles in musical gustation.

A Word From Verywell

The next time you are putting together a playlist to listen to during your commute or conditioning, consider how your personality might be reflected in your song choices. You might also consider listening to styles of music that y'all don't ordinarily prefer; research suggests that doing this may actually accept a lasting impact on the encephalon.

Cheers for your feedback!

Verywell Mind uses merely high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more than about how we fact-check and go on our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

  • Greenbert, DM. Businesswoman-Cohen, S, Stillwell, DJ, Kosinski, M, and Rentfrow. PJ. Musical preferences are linked to cognitive styles. PlosONE. 2015. doi: ten.1371/journal.pone.0131151.

  • North, Air conditioning. Individual differences in musical taste. The American Journal of Psychology. 2010; 123(2): 199-208. doi: ten.5406/amerjpsyc.123.two.0199.

  • Schafer, T & Mehlhorn, C. Tin can personality traits predict musical style preferences? A meta-analysis. Personality and Individual Differences. 2017 116: 265-273. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2017.04.061.

  • Wong, PC, Chan, AH, Roy, A, and Margulis, EH. The bimusical brain is not two monomusical brains in one: Evidence from musical affective processing. J Cogn Neurosci. 2011; 23(12): 4082-4093. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00105.

  • Rentfrow PJ, Goldberg LR, Stillwell DJ, Kosinski M, Gosling SD, Levitin DJ. The Song Remains the Same: A Replication and Extension of the MUSIC Model. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 2012;30(2):161-185. doi:10.1525/mp.2012.xxx.2.161.

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Source: https://www.verywellmind.com/music-and-personality-2795424