Not many studies have been conducted to quantify the relationship that may exist between personality and musical preferences. In fact, un recent meta-analysis seemed to question whether the relationship was very strong.
However, through the use of more modern techniques and a broader understanding of musical taste, it is suggested in a recent study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science that musical preferences may reflect Big Five personality traits.
The Big Five
Previous studies on music and personality have limitations in not being able to fully measure listening habits, because they are based on self-reported preferences and small samples.
However, in the present study, several Spotify users were asked to participate by showing their listening habits over three months, including information about the genres and moods of the music they listened to.
To get a more complete picture, some questions were asked to build a more nuanced understanding: Do you discover new music or listen to old favorites? Are your tastes diverse? Do you have regular listening habits?
Along with these measures, study participants were asked to complete the Inventory of the Big Five, a 44-item questionnaire that measures the five personality traits:
- Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
- Awareness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless)
- Extraversion (sociable/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
- Kindness (friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/uncaring)
- Neuroticism (susceptible/nervous vs. resistant/confident)
To understand how these personality scores relate to music preferences, a machine learning model was trained to predict someone's personality using only their preferences and demographic information.
Those who rated themselves as more 'open to new experiences' tended to listen to more classical, Afropop or 'sentimental' music (e.g. 'Freddie Freeloader' by Miles Davis, 'April Come She Will' by Simon & Garfunkel). Listening to bluesy or 'melancholic' music (e.g. 'Take Care' by drake, 'Karma Police' by Radiohead) has an inverse relationship with self-assessment of 'emotional stability', while people who listen to Death Metal or 'aggressive' music (e.g. 'Boss' by Lil Pump, 'Last Resort' Papa Roach) tend to have fewer 'pleasant' self-evaluations, while people who listen to Jazz or Country have more.
People whose results identified them as extroverted tended to listen to others' playlists more, which could indicate greater trust in musical suggestions from their social networks. Self-rated introverts, on the other hand, tended to dig deeper into an artist's catalog, listening to more tracks from each artist they discovered.
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The news
Tell me what music you like and I'll tell you what personality you have or how you listen to music (on Spotify)
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.