Personality and Music
Our Musical Preferences Reveal More About Ourselves Than We Know
Have you thought about the kind of person you are based on your musical taste?
I’ve always seen music as a wonderful way to enjoy my time. I can either listen to it on my way to work as one would get a cup of coffee. Or I might get into a state of flow while dancing. Or simply play my violin (or piano, whatever I’m in the mood for at the time), and enter into a timeless space of music-making.
And that’s how we usually interact with music in our lives: either as a listener, a dancer or as a music player. It’s something we find pleasure in but we don’t give it a second thought. Why would we? It’s just music we’re talking about, nothing out of the ordinary. We like it and that’s it.
But what if there’s more to music than that?
What if music can reveal so much about people, that just by knowing what you listen to, you learn how people think, feel, and behave?
Several studies (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003; Rentfrow, Goldberg, & Levitin, 2011; Rentfrow, Goldberg, Stillwell, Kosinski, Gosling, & Levitin, 2012; Bonneville-Roussy, Rentfrow, Xu, &…
