Everybody has them — those hidden gems in their iTunes libraries only played through the privacy of headphones or when nobody else is listening. They know every lyric, but in the company of others, they swear they have never heard the song.
According to two recent scientific studies, it turns out these guilty pleasures may reveal a lot more about a person than their inner cheesiness.
Peter Rentfrow of Cambridge University in England and Samuel Gosling of the University of Texas-Austin found that an individual’s music preferences reveal “consistent and accurate” aspects of their personalities and that music-based stereotypes often influence peoples’ impressions of their peers’ traits and values, Gosling told The Daily Free Press.
“We found that music preferences provide unique information about personality that is unavailable through other cues,” their report stated, which will be published in the March issue of Psychological Sciences magazine, according to Gosling’s website.
Gosling and Rentfrow asked 74 UT-Austin students to construct lists of their 10 favorite songs that included titles, artists and genres. Ranging from hip-hop to country, the top 10 CDs were then analyzed by eight student judges who, after each CD, were asked to rate the study participants on 25 different personality measures listed in their report, such as ambition, hostility and love, according to the report.
The report found that the judges’ analyses, which were compared to initial personality profiles taken by psychologists at the beginning of the study, correlated very closely with the psychologists’ data.
The top 10 lists were especially accurate in revealing the participants’ emotional stability, agreeableness and openness to new experiences, according to Gosling and Rentfrow’s results.
“Observers have an intuitive understanding of the links between music preference and personality,” read Rentfrow and Gosling’s report. “[For example], targets with a preference for music with vocals were correctly perceived as extroverted and targets with jazz in their list were correctly perceived as intellectual.”
According to the report, Gosling and Rentfrow also acknowledged the ability for social trends and popular culture to shape the relationship between music and personality.
In a related study published in this month’s Science magazine, Columbia University researchers Mathew Salganik, Peter Sheridan Dodds and Duncan Watts analyzed the relationship between popular culture and musical tastes.
After creating an artificial online music marketplace, the researchers instructed the first half of their 14,341 participants to listen to and download from a list of 48 obscure songs, displaying each song’s title and artist. Their report then indicated that they encouraged the second-half of their participants to choose songs from the same list after displaying the number of downloads from the previous group.
“By controlling the information that [the second group] had about the behavior of [the first], we were able to measure the effect of social influence on outcomes in cultural markets,” Salganik said in an email.
At the experiment’s conclusion, the researchers found the choices of the first group significantly affected what songs the second group listened to, Salganik said.
“One possibility for this is the fact that because there are too many songs to listen to, people need to use some kind of shortcut to reduce the number of choices they have,” Salganik said. “If they see a song that’s been downloaded a lot they assume its good and want to listen to it.”
Although neither group of researchers has fully examined the other’s findings, both say that the results could have an effect on the way music is marketed in the future.
Salganik added that the results of his study could be used to suggest the success of payola, the illegal bribery of radio DJs by record companies to play certain songs.
Gosling said his research would be more beneficial in determining how to market music along with other products, rather than helping market it directly to the listening public.
“Because of the relationship we’ve established between music and personality, our results would probably have more of an impact on advertisers who want to market their product to a specific population,” Gosling said. “They could use the information to associate music that appeals to their targets with the product they are trying to sell.”