Your Appearance, Music Taste, and Social Interaction — More Connected Than You Might Think…
Next time you find yourself in a relatively populated environment, take a moment to glance at someone random from across the room. Do you think you could get a pretty good idea of what kind of music they like to listen to from that single glance? Well, research suggests that you can and that the information you learned about their musical preferences from that brief look might even inform whether you feel like walking over to them to say hello.
If this seems like a stretch to you, maybe consider the ways in which your own musical preferences are related to your identity, mannerisms, and values. Research shows that people gravitate toward music that aligns with their personality traits and that from this connection there are clearly defined stereotypes about the fans of different types of music genres (Langmeyer et al., 2012; Rentfrow & Gosling, 2007).
People’s individual and social identities present in their music preferences (Tian et al., 2021). Music also has a unique role in forming social bonds. Starting in early childhood, research indicates that children prefer other children who like the same songs as them, enjoy songs familiar to them, and who have shared knowledge regarding a song (Soley & Spelke, 2016).
Given the link between our music preferences, personality, and identity, perhaps you can make assumptions about music preferences simply by taking one look at another’s appearance and use that to inform the decision of whether you feel like engaging with them. Doctoral student, Laura Tian, alongside Dr. Ravin Alaei and Dr. Nicholas O. Rule, tested this and explored how people’s appearance signals their music preferences and how this information might be used by others. They conducted a set of three studies to investigate the relationship between appearance, music taste, and social engagement (Tian et al., 2021).
The researchers designed the first study to determine whether people could determine the musical preference of another from their appearance. They first recruited nearly 300 people who they took photos of and then instructed to report their music preferences. Tian’s team then used photoshop to isolate features such as the head, body, eyes, mouth, face, and hair (see figure below).
When these photos were ready, the researchers recruited nearly 4,000 participants to guess the musical genre preferences of the people they were shown photos of. Results from study 1 revealed that participants were able to accurately guess the pictured person’s musical preferences from the photos. A preference for energetic/rhythmic, intense/rebellious, reflective/complex, or upbeat/conventional music could be accurately guessed from pictures of someone’s body, head, face, eyes, and mouth. This data indicated people’s appearance does in fact reveal information about their musical taste.
But how might one’s appearance reveal such specific information about musical taste?
Tian and the research team considered that perceived personality traits of the person pictured might contribute to explaining the accuracy to which others could determine their musical preference, so they designed a second study. In Study 2, 600 people were assigned a set of the same photos used in Study 1 and asked whether the person and features pictured appeared attractive, dominant, powerful, submissive, ordinary versus unique in their style, energetic, neat, tidy, messy, relaxed, and tense.
They found that certain stereotypical cues to personality traits were used to correctly judge the pictured person’s musical taste. These included appearing messy signaling a preference for energetic/rhythmic music, submissiveness signaling preference for reflective/complex music, and submissiveness and energy signaling a preference for upbeat/conventional music. It was interesting though, that no specific appearance traits could predict a preference for intense/rebellious music. Maybe the preference for rebellious music extends to their appearance reflecting a rebelliousness from stereotypes that would otherwise make it easier to peg their musical preference from their appearance?
Ultimately, Study 2 helped solidify the information learned in Study 1 together demonstrating that music taste can be identified from one’s appearance through the use of stereotypes associated with the person’s social group memberships and traits.
Okay, so we can pretty accurately guess people’s musical taste from their appearance, but what do we do with that guess? To understand this, the researchers conducted a third study that explored the social effect of being able to infer someone’s musical taste. They tested this with 400 people who were asked to rate how much they would like to meet a random person presented from the set of nearly 300 pictured people in Study 1.
Results showed that people were more likely to want to meet other people who looked like they preferred energetic/rhythmic music when they also preferred that type of music, but matching in a preference for intense/rebellious music or reflective/complex music did not predict wanting to meet people with those musical tastes. Perhaps the traits associated with energetic/rhythmic music such as neat and submissive contributed to this matching preference compared to intense/rebellious music which participants associated with dominant, disheveled young men. Also, the more people pictured liked reflective/complex and upbeat/conventional music, the more others reported wanting to meet them. This suggests that music taste contributes to guiding one’s social intentions and behaviors with others to the point of wanting to meet someone or not.
Dr. Tian’s research seems to show that our music tastes say a lot about us. Whether we are aware of it or not, our music tastes are displayed in our appearance and perceived traits might even be influencing someone’s decision to socially engage with us or not. Can our musical taste have that much influence? It’s important to put it into perspective that so many variables are at play when making social decisions and this research shows music is one of them. Not only are we able to gauge someone else’s musical taste from simply one glance, but these signals of musical preferences can also interact in our social lives in interesting ways. Ultimately, the connection between our musical preferences and appearance contributes to the richness with which music manifests in our identity and our social world at large.
So, next time you take a glance at someone random from across the room you might consider the ways in which music preferences come into play.
