When you’re at a party and you meet new people, you’d like
to have some way to get to know about them quickly. You can try to talk about sports with people,
but not everyone follows sports. You can
try to talk about politics, but those conversations can get heated quickly.
Instead, people often ask others about music. Finding out the music that someone else likes
seems to give you a lot of information about them quickly. A study by Peter Rentfrow, and Sam Gosling
published in Psychological Science in
2006 found that college students getting to know each other over the internet
are more likely to ask about music preferences than about all other categories
of conversation topics combined. This
research also found that knowing someone’s music preferences allowed students to
do a reasonable job of predicting some of the new person’s personality
characteristics and values. Personality
characteristics are the basic dimensions of behavior along which people differ. Values are beliefs and goals that influence
how people approach the world.
On top of that, when we find out that someone shares our
musical interests, that increases how much we like them. This idea was explored in a paper by Diana
Boer, Ronald Fischer, Micha Strack, Michael Bond, Eva Lo, and Jason Lam in the
September, 2011 issue of Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin.
In one study, they asked fans of metal or hip-hop music to
evaluate descriptions of people who either shared their musical taste, had a
different music preference, or had no stated music preference. The participants were asked how much they
thought they would like this person.
They also rated how similar they thought this person was to them along a
variety of personality characteristics and values.
Unsurprisingly, people expressed that they liked a new
person better when finding that they shared the same musical taste than when
they did not. The amount that someone
felt that they would like the new person was based strongly on how much they
thought the new person would share similar values rather than similar
personality characteristics.
This effect was also observed in a study of college
roommates in Hong Kong. In this study, college students who had been
rooming together for a few months were asked about music preference, how much
they liked each other, and a variety of questions about similarities in
values. Music preferences predicted
similarities in values, which in turn predicted how much the roommates liked each
other.
This research suggests that we often ask people about their
musical preferences, because musical taste serves as an easy indicator of
whether we are likely to be similar to new people in ways that will influence
how much we like them.
In the end, of course, we can’t know from this research
whether music influences values or values influence the music people like (or
both). That is, people may generally
spend time with others who share their values.
In these social settings, music is often shared, and the music you hear
affects what music you like. So, sharing
values could cause music preference.
But, the opposite could also be true. Music expresses values. Lyrics have social messages. In this way, listening to particular musical
styles could affect people’s values.
But, that is a topic for future research.
