Intuition Versus Information: Music Preference & Personality

Abstract

Previous research has shown that one can make somewhat accurate inferences about one’s personality just by knowing that person’s musical preferences. However, it is unclear what types of information people are using to make these inferences. The current study explored whether intuitive judgments about personality, inferred from musical preference alone, are as accurate as judgments based on links reported in the literature between personality and musical preference. To test this, two raters were recruited to evaluate the personalities of 50 participants based on a 10 song playlist constructed for each participant according to their Spotify history’s most frequent tracks from the previous year. The raters used their own intuitive approaches to rating the personalities of half of the participants, and to rate the second half of participants, they used a set of criteria based on links reported in the literature between personality and preference for specific genres. Overall accuracy of inferences was higher for both raters when using their own intuitions (mean correlation with participants’ actual personalities = .25) than basing their judgments on the literature, which yielded accuracy correlations no higher than chance (mean correlation = -.02). When rating openness and agreeableness, Rater 2 was more accurate when basing ratings on the literature than intuition, but was more accurate when using intuitive ratings for the other personality factors. Rater 1 was more accurate when using intuitive ratings than literature-derived ratings for all five factors. Although this exploratory study does not point to how raters use their intuition to infer personality, it suggests that intuition may be more useful when inferring personality from musical taste than using a systematic approach that is informed by the literature.