Why We Like People Who Share Our Taste In Music

The Huffington Post:

When you’re at a party and you meet new people, you’d like to have some way to get to know about them quickly. You can try to talk about sports with people, but not everyone follows sports. You can try to talk about politics, but those conversations can get heated quickly.

Instead, people often ask others about music. Finding out the music that someone else likes seems to give you a lot of information about them, quickly. A study by Peter Rentfrow, and Sam Gosling published in Psychological Science in 2006 found that college students getting to know each other over the Internet are more likely to ask about music preferences than about all other categories of conversation topics combined. This research also found that knowing someone’s music preferences allowed students to do a reasonable job of predicting some of the new person’s personality characteristics and values. Personality characteristics are the basic dimensions of behavior along which people differ. Values are beliefs and goals that influence how people approach the world.

Read the whole story: The Huffington Post