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Musical Preferences Predict Personality: Evidence From Active Listening and Facebook Likes

Gideon Nave¹; Juri Minxha²; David M. Greenberg³; Michal Kosinski⁴; David Stillwell⁵; Jason Rentfrow³

¹ Department of Marketing, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania · ² Computation & Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology · ³ Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge · ⁴ Graduate School of Business, Stanford University · ⁵ Judge Business School, University of Cambridge

Research over the past decade has shown that various personality traits are communicated through musical preferences. One limitation of that research is external validity, as most studies have assessed individual differences in musical preferences using self-reports of music-genre preferences. Are personality traits communicated through behavioral manifestations of musical preferences? We addressed this question in two large-scale online studies with demographically diverse populations. Study 1 ( N = 22,252) shows that reactions to unfamiliar musical excerpts predicted individual differences in personality—most notably, openness and extraversion—above and beyond demographic characteristics. Moreover, these personality traits were differentially associated with particular music-preference dimensions. The results from Study 2 ( N = 21,929) replicated and extended these findings by showing that an active measure of naturally occurring behavior, Facebook Likes for musical artists, also predicted individual differences in personality. In general, our findings establish the robustness and external validity of the links between musical preferences and personality.

DOI

10.1177/0956797618761659

Volume

29 (7)

Pages

1145-1158

Language

en

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Sources

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