Here’s What Your Favorite Music Says About Your Personality

Your taste in music could reveal insights into your personality, according to two studies published in Psychological Science.

Researchers from Cambridge and US universities surveyed more than 21,000 people in two separate online surveys to see how five main personality types known collectively as the Big Five – those that are open-minded, extroverted, agreeable, neurotic, and conscientious – matched up with different genres of music. These included tunes that were mellow, unpretentious, sophisticated, intense, and contemporary. 

Previous attempts at finding links between music and personality traits didn’t necessarily represent a wide variety of people because the respondents tended to be younger – thus more likely to share similar music tastes – and had varying definitions of the musical genres they were listening to. This time around, more than half of the respondents were older than 22 and all were presented with 25 unfamiliar musical extracts pre-categorized by musicologists.

“These results corroborate that music – a form of self-expression that is ubiquitous across human cultures – communicates meaningful information about basic psychological characteristics,” said the authors in their study. 

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