Older and Musically Wiser?
Back in March I asked for your help with some research on music and personality I was carrying out with my colleagues. Although it was restricted to people living in the UK, there was a healthy response to the online questionnaire. Joy of joys, there were also some interesting results, so I thought I would update you with how it turned out.
Music preferences and personality
Perhaps you'll remember this research was based on the relationships found between the music people like and their personalities (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003). More specifically, correlations have been found between the general attributes of musical genres that people like and responses to the 'Big Five' personality questionnaires (these Big Five factors are extraversion, openness to experience, neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness).
There was a suggestion in the previous research that age might play a role in this relationship. This makes some intuitive sense - it's possible that with age comes musical wisdom. As a result your musical taste better reflects your personality; or perhaps your personality better reflects your musical taste!
Results
Either way, the research tested this idea using a personality questionnaire and the Short Test of Musical Preferences (with the fantastic acronym 'STOMP' ). When the data was analysed, it did indeed support the idea that the musical genre preferences of those over 30 were more strongly asssociated with their personalities than those aged between 18 and 30 (Dean, Yu & Epps (2007).
The correlations found for those aged 18 to 30 were between openness to experience and two categories of musical genres: music that is 'reflective & complex' and 'intense & rebellious' (r = .4 & .19 respectively). For those over 30, along with these associations, two more correlations emerged, these were between genres that were 'upbeat & conventional' and each of the two personality factors conscientiousness and agreeableness (r = .29 & .31 respectively).
How can this be explained? I speculate the age difference results from identity development. Young people are generally more engaged in the stressful work of developing and forming their identities. Part of this process might be about 'trying on' different types of music for size. For the more mature, however, their identity has usually settled down, so connections between music genre preferences and personality are stronger.
Thank you
So, thanks again to everyone who took part and watch this space for some new research I'll be conducting online.
→ Encephalon #21 is live at Ouroboros
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Really interesting, thanks for sharing the results. Is it possible to find out more detail? I'm particularly interested in which genres are considered e.g. 'reflective and complex', and how this classification came about. Thanks!
Hi Claire, you're welcome! The overarching categories of genres were found using factor analysis. The technical details are in Rentfrow & Gosling's article which is available online here.
I find the studies assumptions quite interesting. Music more closely matching personality means that people are musically wise? Musically WISE?
What does that mean?
Does it imply teenagers full of hot air, are clearly lacking wisdom and are full of thoughtless tension?
You used these contentiously loaded categories: 'reflective & complex' music apparently in opposition to 'intense & rebellious' music.
So CLEARLY intense rebellious music is neither reflective nor complex. Also, it conversely suggests that reflective and complex music may not be rebellious and intense.
This is the inference here.
'Reflective and complex' adults, and 'intense and rebellious' young whippersnappers are the findings of the study.
This judgemental categorisation isn't surprising as the categories for the study specifically filtered out music from artists that crossed creative boundaries. “In instances in which the appropriate genre of a song could not be determined by these means, the song was not included in the analyses.”
So artists that aren't creatively satisfied with a particular musical pigeon-hole, and expand beyond multiple genre's aren't represented. This is important because the most creative and insightful musicians are likely to be in this group, as most music fans will attest.
It should be noted how diverse the space is for music that younger people listen to. Young people are very familiar with obtaining music online for free (or very little cost), with all the diversity that the internet may provide – I'd hypothesise: it provides far more potential for diversity than even 50 years of experience of an average person's exposure to media may provide. Older people are much more familiar with buying in major label supported stores in brick-and-mortar shops. Further still, research suggests that people can have preferences for music styles set into them from when they are young, so it's possible the range of diversity they are willing to expose themselves to is set at an earlier age.
I would propose that music that older people have been exposed to will stick with them due to several factors, including limited range and exploration.
Could it be that older people have (disgruntly), come to accept inadequacies of their environment, while establishing themselves in the world of work, pragmatically, and slowly having their objections to the world's state of affairs, blocked out and die down along with unmet ambitions of their younger selves?
Expectations for them to calm down and 'act their age' steadily, and progressively rise. They become 'institutionalised', as in socialised into thinking like the organisations that they work at. Even if individuals don't settle down as much as social norms dictate that they 'should', record labels will very precisely target them with exactly what they expect they should like, as that 'older age group'. Simulacra and simulation – art reflecting life and life reflecting art, the puzzle of origin.
It sounds like you have found a correlation caused by differences in how people growing up are exposed to different kinds of music and sociological contexts. Of course, it's the old story: the Grand Narratives are gone and so as you say teenagers are 'clearly' "'trying on' different types of music for size".
But what if those young whippersnapper's aren't just enraged teenagers, pepped up on adolescences hormones, being torn between one self-identity and another?
What if they are on to something? Even if they are wrong, what if they are on to something?
What if this war waging, post-modern, advertising entrenched, individualist, corporate, Prozac saturated, industrialist society, isn't just fine?
What if, in part the positions younger people hold in society make them more able to rethink relationships between things before they become *part* of those relationships and then blind to them?
I've previously conducted a small study between young people's personality traits and how independent the music artists they like are.
It found that there is indeed a correlation between young people's tastes and the independence of their music label.
Inferring that corporate influence in music taste isn't easy to ignore, and that a more detailed study clustering the associations may more closely enlighten us to just how personality and music categories are related.
Hi Luke, thanks for your creative critique, very interesting. I think you're a little harsh on this study though. But you're certainly right to consider alternative explanations as this is a very new and emerging field.
I'd be interested in a few more details about your study if you'd like to provide them, I'm not quite sure what you found...
It seems to me that your correlation coefficients aren't actually that high.
Indeed - the correlations are of a similar order to the research this is based on.
The methodology for these kinds of studies seems to me to raise a lot of questions. Firstly, participants and experts are likely to be familiar with much of the music prior to the study, and there is a lot of social baggage tied up with that. Pigeonholing styles and issues such as musical complexity are fraught with problems. However, a lot of the theory on this is heavy-going for musicologists (I blog as someone with a musicology doctorate), let alone those with other specialisations, and musicology has to be one of the most inaccessible areas for a multidisciplinary approach. Another point is that cultural roles for styles change over time: my Dad went to jazz clubs in the late 50s/early 60s while I was an 'indie kid' 30 years later, but our positioning of ourselves among our peers was probably much closer than the difference in the sound of the music might suggest. However, musicologists tend to waffle pretentiously rather than get rigorous with the methodology, and I'm only a beginner psychologist, so I'm not quite sure of the solutions!
Hi Raich, methodologically, factor analysis is used to try and circumvent the problem you're talking about here. This is a statistical technique to search for commonalities in data. The idea is that it'll group together music on the basis of its over-arching type, irrespective of genre or age.
It's not without it's problems but it's a useful way of tackling the question.