Your taste in music is unique and is formed by many different life experiences that are representative of you, the individual. Or maybe not.
Okay, maybe that’s too far. But according to a pair of studies published in Psychological Science, your personality may contain some markers for what kind of music you end up liking.
Using the “Big Five” personality types—extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and open-mindedness—researchers surveyed 21,000 people and sorted them by the five personalities and then looked for links in their music preferences.
In some ways, what they managed to engineer is something of a reverse personality test, which you should be skeptical about because the scientific basis of personality tests are often not particularly strong. Personality is a complicated, not easily categorized thing. However, in accounting for taste and preferences, they did find a few things.
Agreeable people tended to rate all music higher, while neurotic people tended to be less forgiving across the board, something that does track in a general sense. People who preferred acoustic music tended to be more energetic and talkative people. The same, extraverted people often enjoyed generally “unpretentious music,” as opposed to open-minded people who enjoyed more sophisticated, complex music, for example, opera.
Does any of this match your personality? How about anyone you know? Let us know what you think on Twitter.
