Personality, Music, and Political preferences

We are what we eat, and in a time when we eat while listening to Spotify or by checking music videos on broadcasting websites, we are definitely the music we listen to.

Several works have been made on the relationship between music and the -not that- unique characteristics of an individual: personality. Despite the huge body of literature on this, controversial results have been found for what concerns the relationship between musical taste and personality traits.

In a meta-analysis conducted in 2017 by Schäfer and Mehlhorn, shreds of evidence of the relationship between musical preferences and personality were severely questioned, and as highlighted by the authors most correlations were small or close to zero, On 30 coefficients only 6 presented a magnitude exceeding 0.1, and personality traits barely account for interindividual differences in music preferences. With that in mind, the discussion on personality and music seems closed, but was that so?

Donal Trump (Photo by History in HD on Unsplash).

Personality, Music, and Political orientations?

Devenport and North recently published their work “Predicting musical taste: Relationships with personality aspects and political orientation” in which they investigate the relationship between personality traits, political orientation, and music preferences. In the introduction of their paper, they made an amazing work in describing and supporting their hypothesis, and in the selection of the tools to use to test those. More specifically, they employed three scales — Short Test of Musical Preferences (STOMP-R), the Big Five Aspects Scale (BFAS), and the International Personality Item Pool Liberalism (IPIP Liberalism) to verify whether big five aspects are better than big five domains in predicting political orientation and whether political orientation will account in significant unique variance in musical taste (as well as two other hypotheses on conflicting and weak relationship that I won’t discuss in here).

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Before running their experiment, they first adapted the musical preferences scale to the Australian context, obtaining a final scale of 15 different musical genres, that have been clustered as Intense (Punk, Metal, Rock, Alternative/Indie), Rhythmic (Rap/Hip-hop, Soul/ R&B, Reggae), Established (Folk, Jazz/Blues, Classical/Opera, Country), and Mainstream (Pop, Soundtracks/Theme songs, Pre-90s Pop).

Moving to the application of the methods, they conducted a study on a sample composed of 157 University students (and hey, they did a power analysis!). Participants have been asked to fill the scales, then correlations and regression analysis were performed.

A couple listening to some music (Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash)

So do I love Trump if I listen to some Hard Rock?

To sum up their results:

Punk, Metal, Rock, Alternative/Indie show a significant positive relationship with compassion, liberalism, and the openness domain (Hey! This is me!)

Rap/Hip-hop, Soul/ R&B, Reggae are positively related to liberalism, withdrawal, compassion, assertiveness, enthusiasm, and agreeableness

Folk, Jazz/Blues, Classical/Opera, Country are positively related to openness and liberalism

Pop, Soundtracks/Theme songs, Pre-90s Pop show a negative correlation with openness, intellect, industriousness, neuroticism, volatility, and withdrawal.

Moreover, according to their data, personality aspects and political orientation were superior predictors of musical taste in comparison to personality domains.

Honestly, I love this study. It is brilliant to see how the authors tackled a complex problem by relying on a previous meta-analysis and on some cool and tested scales. Moreover, I can now bully pop lovers on my next night out. Will you do the same?

As always, thank you for reading so far. Leave your thoughts on this paper in the comments and let me know if you have any article in mind for the next entries of the Pills of Psy.

Source:

Devenport, S. P., & North, A. C. (2019). Predicting musical taste: Relationships with personality aspects and political orientation. Psychology of Music, 0305735619864647.

Other references:

Schäfer, T., & Mehlhorn, C. (2017). Can personality traits predict musical style preferences? A meta-analysis. Personality and Individual Differences, 116, 265–273.