Music is part of our identity, and many believe that favorite music can say a lot about their character. The University of Texas conducted a study that sought to find a correlation between beloved music genres and the character traits of respondents. Students passed several tests – on musical preferences, personality type, and IQ level. Then, psychologists compared the test results and found some correlations between the results.
In total, they identified four groups (in later versions of the test there was also a fifth group):
- Blues, classical music, folk, jazz.
- Alternative, Heavy Metal, Rock
- Country, pop, religious music, soundtracks
- Electronics, hip-hop, rap, soul
Music from the first group is loved by “complicated” people who tend to reflect: liberals, intellectuals, not very sporty, but open to new experiences.
The second group is preferred by “pushy and rebellious” nature – they have much in common with the previous group, but they are more sporty and do not like to seem smarter than everyone else.
The third group includes optimists and extroverts, who are more conscientious and inclined to agree with others. They see themselves as athletic, rich, beautiful and politically conservative. This group is the least prone to depression, but its IQ test scores are also lower than those of others.
Music from the fourth group is preferred by energetic and rhythmic people, who share many of the perceptions of respondents from the third group, characterized by lack of conservatism, higher income and IQ. Interestingly, representatives of the latter group are the least inclined to emotional impulses and prefer not to listen to their feelings.
A similar study was conducted at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. Scientists asked 36 thousand people to evaluate many musical styles and take a personality test.
It turned out that pop music is loved by “honest and not very creative” people, rap fans have high self-esteem, and heavy metal fans are gentle, but not very confident. Indies prefer “not very hardworking introverts”, and jazz and classical music – people with high intelligence and self-esteem.
Personal tests are not the only metrics. There is another group of studies that use cognitive tests – they allow us to evaluate a person’s thinking style on a scale from purely empathic to purely systematic. The first ones want and are able to understand the feelings and emotions of other people. The latter are inclined to look for patterns of behavior and to analyze systems of relationships.
Such research was conducted among four thousand respondents – they filled in online questionnaires and learned their thinking style. Then they listened to 50 musical passages from different genres and rated them on a scale from 1 (very disliked) to 9 (very liked).
It turned out that those who are more inclined to think empathically like softer music (RnB, soul, soft rock). People with systematic thinking prefer punk, heavy metal and heavy rock.
These are interesting statistics from dalmiocuore.it – people really listen to music in different ways: someone perceives it only at the level of emotions, while others, for example, are very interested in its composition device. Hence, there may be a connection between the type of thinking and genre preferences.