Why extroverts love Taylor Swift but worriers like a burst of Bowie
After study of 350,000 people in 53 countries...
IF you have a spring in your step and a song in your heart, it may well be sung by Taylor Swift.
However, those who are angry or frustrated are likely to crank David Bowie to full volume.
In fact, our favourite music can say more about our personality types than we realise.
Extroverts appear to enjoy upbeat music with a strong rhythm they can dance to, while the most conscientious may be Dolly Parton fans, according to research.
A study of more than 350,000 people from 53 nations looked at the link between their personalities and music choices.
It found warm and agreeable people preferred mellow music played
‘Used to reinforce negative feelings’
by the likes of Marvin Gaye or Paul McCartney. Neurotic types gravitate towards offbeat artists like Bowie and loud, angry rock and alternative bands such as Nirvana, and the Sex Pistols.
Dr David Greenberg, who led the research at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and is an honorary research associate at the University of Cambridge, said: ‘The link between neurotic people and intense music like punk and heavy metal suggests they may use music to reinforce negative feelings, which may not be good for them. But the music may at least help them blow off steam.’
Dr Greenberg, a jazz musician, said: ‘We found strong links between personality and music. For example, conscientious people, who are orderly and unlikely to have a messy home, are unlikely to like disordered music like avant-garde jazz.
‘People who are agreeable tend to be empathetic, which is why songs about relationships, heartbreak and love may appeal to them.’
We spend up to 44 per cent of our waking lives listening to music, evidence shows. To see how personality influences our choices, researchers grouped 23 genres into five styles of music – mellow, unpretentious, sophisticated, intense and contemporary. Then they looked at the responses of almost 290,000 people who rated the genres and did a personality questionnaire.
A second part of the study – which backed up the main research – involved more than 70,000 people, including almost 12,000 in the UK, who rated 25 excerpts of relatively obscure music from 16 genres. This survey – at musicaluniverse.io – is still available for people to try.
The authors of the research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggest music could even change personalities, with lyrics about others perhaps making people more kind.