What our choice of music says about our personality.
For anyone who has ever caught a bright adult contemporary on the radio and wondered, “Who loves this stuff?” As the pointer rotates, a new study may have an answer. A bunch of softies, that's who. In a paper, published in the online journal PLoS One, Cambridge psychologist David Greenberg theorized that music taste is partly determined by people's tendency to fall into one of two rugged personality categories: empathizers or systemizers. Empathizers are people who are very much in tune with the emotions and mental states of others. Systemizers focus more on patterns that control the natural and physical worlds. 4,000 people participated in these experiments, which consisted of questionnaires and reviewing 50 pieces of music.
Systemizers vs Empathizers
Greenberg felt that people who scored high on empathy tended to prefer music that was gentle (like soft rock and R&B), unpretentious (country and folk) and contemporary (Euro pop and electronics).) What they didn't like, meanwhile, was “Intense” music, which he classified as things like punk and heavy metal. People who scored high on systematization had the exact opposite preferences in the meantime, they shook back to Slayer and were able to do without Courtney Barnett. To become even more specific, the music musicians were usually preferred to be softer, more depressing and emotional. Meanwhile, systemizers were grooved into things that were energetic, animated, and complex. Empathizers loved strings; systemizers loved distorted, loud and “percussive”.
