A musical John Kerry

305 words written by dylan
Posted March 13, 2004 @ 09:16 AM
5 comments

From an article in today's Seattle P-I:

Groundbreaking research has found that a person's record collection may help predict which of five personality categories he or she belongs to.

Music preference also may reveal individual traits such as political ideology, intelligence and physical attractiveness.

Similarly, how that music is organized -- alphabetized on shelves, separated by genre or scattered on the floor -- is a reflection of personality, another study shows.

So the question becomes, when you bring your date home and he or she inspects your music collection, what's that person really seeing?

The studies indicate a music collection and how it's organized may tell where an owner fits in a group of personality categories called the "Big Five": extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness.

The article makes a bunch of generalizations -- disorganized collections are a sign of an "artistic" bent, while alphabetized and categorized CDs mean a person is OCD. So, if 70% of my CDs are organized, 20% of them are piled up in random fashion waiting to be organized, and the other 10% are somewhere among my stuff... what does that make me?

Then there's this chart:

MUSIC PREFERENCE AND PERSONALITY

Classical, jazz, blues, folk -- Reflective and complex (open, politically liberal, intelligent, not athletic, with verbal cognitive ability)
Alternative, rock, heavy metal -- Intense and rebellious (open, athletic, intelligent, with verbal cognitive ability)
Country, pop, religious, soundtracks -- Upbeat and conventional (extroverted, agreeable, conscientious, politically conservative, physically attractive, wealthy, athletic, low on verbal cognitive ability)
Rap/hip-hop, soul/funk, electronica/dance -- Energetic and rhythmic (extroverted, politically liberal, physically attractive, athletic, "blirtatious")

I own ALL these genres of music. What am I? Conservative? Liberal? Conventional? Unconventional? Extroverted? Introverted? All of it? None of it? John Kerry?

Bad journalism all around. Excuse me while I turn up Neko Case.

Comments

  1. Looks like you've got disassociative identity disorder.

    Me too.

    Posted by: samantha | March 13, 2004 11:49 AM

  2. Me four. Er... three.

    Posted by: Dave | March 13, 2004 09:12 PM

  3. Actually - this study just shows how banned professional academics should be. OK - professional-grad-student-looser - you went and did personality tests on people (which are about 90% BS anyway), then mapped their music collections (which, like most collections are 90% unused) to the results: "Ground breaking research!" or more realistically 90% BS + 90% irrelevance = waste of time.

    Publish or perish? Why not just perish?

    Posted by: ben | March 14, 2004 06:50 AM

  4. Hey, I work with people like that. At least they're working in medicine, so they're at least doing SOMETHING constructive.

    And I'm not DID, though I have moments of depersonalization on occasion.

    Posted by: dw | March 14, 2004 09:31 PM

  5. Got all of them too-- but lately it's been the first category-- and I'm pretty centrist. Then again, I am a librarian...

    Posted by: Kennedy | March 16, 2004 07:12 PM