Music and personality: what psychology research actually says about music taste and personality traits

What does someone's music taste say about them? Enough people have asked that the question now has a research literature behind it, running from the early 1980s to the present, with samples in the tens of thousands. The short answer is that music and personality are connected, the connection is weaker than the magazine version suggests, and one trait does nearly all of the work.

Music and personality: where the research started

The modern field begins properly in 2003, when Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology with the title The Do Re Mi's of Everyday Life. They did something nobody had bothered with: they asked what the actual structure of musical preference is, rather than assuming that genre labels are the right unit, and found four broad dimensions underneath dozens of genres — reflective and complex, intense and rebellious, upbeat and conventional, energetic and rhythmic.

That framework was revised in 2011 into five factors (mellow, unpretentious, sophisticated, intense and contemporary), which is where most current research on music taste and personality starts. The revision matters because it moved the field away from genre names, which are unstable, and towards attributes a listener can actually be tested on. Almost every study of music and personality published since works on those five factors rather than on genres.

The big five personality traits, and what they predict

Nearly all of this work measures personality traits with the five-factor model: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Against those five, the findings are consistent and undramatic.

Openness is the strong one. High scorers prefer complex, unfamiliar, structurally interesting music, and the effect appears in every large sample anyone has run. Extraversion shows a smaller, reliable association with energetic and rhythmic music and with using music socially. Agreeableness relates faintly to mainstream, upbeat preferences. Conscientiousness barely registers. Neuroticism shows up less in what people listen to than in why — high scorers are more likely to use music to regulate mood and more likely to report that sad music helps. Nothing in the music and personality literature contradicts that pattern; the disagreements are about how large it is.

The size of these effects is the part that gets lost. Correlations between personality traits and musical preference typically sit between 0.1 and 0.25. That is a real signal in a sample of ten thousand people and close to noise for the person sitting opposite you.

What music taste actually signals to other people

The more interesting finding is about communication rather than prediction. Rentfrow and Gosling also had strangers rate people purely on their top ten songs, and those strangers agreed with each other and were reasonably accurate, again mostly on openness. Music taste is a broadcast, and people read it.

Which is why taste is performed as much as it is held. Anyone who has arranged their records before a party knows the impulse. There is a song about exactly this: the Glamorous Indie Rock And Roll lyrics are a straight-faced joke about adopting a genre as a personality, sung by a band who had done exactly that on purpose.

Signalling cuts the other way too. Agreeableness, the trait most associated with going along with the room, has the weakest and least stable relationship with preference of the five, and one reasonable reading is that agreeable people are the most likely to report the taste that suits their company rather than the taste they have.

The psychology of the rock music personality stereotype

The best-known study in this area is not the most careful one, but it is the one that stuck. In 2008 Adrian North at Heriot-Watt University surveyed around 36,000 people across more than sixty countries and reported that heavy metal fans and classical fans produced almost identical profiles: creative, gentle, at ease with themselves, not particularly outgoing. The rock music personality that most people carry around (aggressive, unstable, a bit dangerous) turned out to be a media artefact rather than a measurement.

The rock music personality stereotype is worth taking seriously as a phenomenon even though it fails as a description. It has been used to explain moral panics, court cases and school policy, and none of it was ever supported by the psychology. What the data support is much duller: people who like intense music score slightly higher on openness and slightly lower on agreeableness, and that is the whole of it.

Personality based on music taste: how far can you go?

Judging personality based on music taste is something everyone does and nobody does well. The research supports three modest claims. Openness is partly readable from preference. Strangers agree with one another about what a playlist implies, whether or not they are right. And preference is more stable than most other tastes, because it is laid down in adolescence and rarely rebuilt.

That last point is the one worth holding on to. Most people's core taste is set between about fourteen and twenty-four, and what it records is not a personality type but a period of life. So when someone asks what does someone's music taste say about them, the most defensible answer is: it says where they were when they were seventeen, and who they were trying to be at the time. Everything else is inference with a small effect size — see also the piece on melancholy in music, where the same pattern shows up in who chooses to listen to sad records on purpose.