A recent study looked at links between personality traits and tastes in music, finding fans of The Smiths and Bring Me The Horizon to be among the “most neurotic”.

A 2015 study, conducted by Stanford University and Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre, looked at the interests of Facebook users, via pages they had “liked”, and answers from a 100-question quiz app called myPersonality, which scored a person’s openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The study was recently highlighted by The New York Times in wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.


Its results found that Björk and Tom Waits fans are the “most open” of fan groups, while Cheryl fans are among the “least open”.

Bring Me The Horizon fans, meanwhile, are seen as the “least conscientious”, while fans of rappers Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame are the “most extroverted” and Nightwish fans the “least extroverted”.

Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Judas Priest and Placebo fans are deemed by the study as the “least agreeable” bunch. Manson and Placebo fans are also the “most neurotic”, as are people who like The Smiths and Bring Me The Horizon.

Cambridge Analytica has been accused in recent days of harvesting millions of Facebook profiles to help target and influence groups of the electorate on social media, particularly during Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign.

Former employee and whistleblower Christopher Wylie recently claimed: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”