Psychology of music preference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_music_preference

by dunstad • 11 years ago

11 2 11 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

dunstad• 11 years ago

I found it interesting how extraversion and openness to experience were separate here. I've always parceled those two together, and anecdotally there seems to be some correlation there.

krick• 11 years ago

This article might be quite nice example for why so many people angrily reject calling psychology a "science". All that stuff is pretty much obvious in the sense of "this is what one would assume about others music preferences", it's all too ambiguous and, honestly, results of any "study" of that short may change drastically, depending on expected results and research methods used. The worst part of it is I very much believe there are some studies, that "show" these results (I didn't bother to follow the links).

Of course, I haven't done any "psychological studies" on that matter, but I dare to say that unbiased reality is much more prosaic and quite obvious for anyone who has experience of, well, communicating with people. The psychological portrait of a teenager who doesn't actually know about most of music outside his favorite band/genre will correlate with the genre, because he didn't really chose the genre: it is just part of subculture he belongs to, which is obviously related to person's nature and culture of his time/location. It doesn't have to (and probably even doesn't) depend on music itself.

The same stays true about a person, that this teenager became after growing up. Obviously, these guys will be majority of any study of the sorts.

Finding some relationship between music preferred and psychological portrait could be interesting among a group of individuals, who have broad knowledge of music, and can name preferred genre, which they listen the most. These are always a minority, and unsurprisingly, any stereotypes about relationship between music preferences and personality just happen to be wrong to the point of being hilarious: such big is incompatibility between "what this guy should be listening to according to stereotypes" and "what he actually listens". Even more often, though, anyone who has broad enough knowledge of music to chose a genre, fails to name a genre, because he really just has favorite songs or albums (for about any possible mood), not bands and genres.

Psychology of music preference

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