THE EFFECT OF PEER INFLUENCE ON MUSICAL PREFERENCE

Abstract

Peer influence is one of the strongest external factors a young individual can face in today's society when it comes to making a decision of any kind. Peer influence has been shown to increase behavioral conformity in a variety of studies. The current experiment examined the effects of peer influence on self-reported musical preference and listening behavior. It was designed to test whether a visual cue about the experimenter's musical preferences would influence participants' behavior during the experiment. The preference cue was one of two T-shirts (depicting either a rap or rock musician) worn by the experimenter during data collection. Twenty participants provided preference ratings about 15 genres of music after interacting with the experimenter. They were asked to listen to a short number of song excerpts from relatively obscure rap and rock musicians and were instructed to skip songs as desired. The amount of time they spent listening to each genre was used as an implicit measure of their interest in that genre. Familiarity with each song was also measured. Results revealed that reported preferences, familiarity, and listening time were all significantly higher for the peer-endorsed genre (i.e., the one they had seen on the T-shirt) than the other genre. However, we cannot conclude that the manipulation caused these differences, as pre-existing differences in familiarity pose an experimental confound. Future research is needed to test the influence of music T-shirts worn by peers on listening behavior and self-reported preferences.