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Personality Secrets in Your MP3 Player
Jeremy Dean writes "Once past saying 'hello' and 'how are you?' to someone you've just met, what is next? How do we make friends and get to know other people? Psychologists have talked about the importance of body language, physical appearance and clothing but they've not been so keen on what we actually talk about. A recent study put participants in same-sex and opposite-sex pairings and told them to get to know each other over 6 weeks (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2006). Analysing the results, they found the most popular topic of conversation was music. What is it about music that's so useful when we first meet someone and what kind of information can we extract from the music another person likes? "
It's much easier to say you like some crappy indie band in order to get inside a girl's pants.
"Once past saying 'hello' and 'how are you?' to someone you've just met, what is next?"
* Retreat back to cube and resume coding
* Avoid eye contact and hope someone else comes along to relieve you from having to make conversation
* Launch into a rant
* "I don't have friends/conversations/etc, you insensitive clod!"
* Generic Cowboy Neal reference
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Guy:Hey
Girl:Hey
Guy:Hey, I've got a nano!
Girl:I have to go... and... wash my hair...
Me - I love you too.
Her - Yeah, they are a great band.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
My first question is "Do you know what Linux is?". I find that is infinitely more helpful than asking what music somebody likes.
The government can't save you.
Not many use the word "squirt" in a bar without intending to follow it up with some form of fluid exchange. This can too often be misinterpreted as a bad pick-up line, and in some cases might actually get you tossed out of the bar like some kind of pariah.
Not that, uh, I know about this, uh...first-hand....
Shit.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If they can't answer "What level is your character?" without flinching, it's DATE OVER.
...As an icebreaker. Classic moment is when Ralph Wiggum is walking with Lisa and he didn't have anything to say, so he said, "So... do you like... stuff?"
I have this theory that all things in life can be referenced by something on Simpsons, Futurama, or Family Guy. So like an idiot, I tried testing this theory once, with an actual pro football cheerleader I was out on a date with. (Yeah, wrong time to test that theory).
We had things to talk about, but when a moment of dead silence came, I did the Ralph act, "So... do you like... stuff?", and she gave me a WTF look. Yep, I quickly moved onto music and other safe topics.
Music just has the right characteristics to be a good conversation topic.
I strongly disagree. Music is often thought to be good conversation topic and a good meter for determining what type of personality someone has. 90% of the time actually starting such a conversation, however, results in canned responses based upon what social circle the person is in and what they think is "cool." Most younger people especially tend to listen to music to make a statement, rather than to reflect their real tastes. The average conversation about music goes something like this:
So, what kind of music do you like?
Umm, you know, indy music, like [pop_band_x] or [pop_band_y]
Really, huh those are okay, have you heard [band_z]
Umm, no, are they good?
...
Such conversation is dreadful and useless. If you want to get to know someone and make an impression, you need to be a bit more interesting yourself. I like to start conversations with something spontaneous, like, "hi you don't know me but I think you're really sexy. Can you think of any circumstance under which you'd murder someone?" Or start off by breaking them out of the conversational mold. I met some really interesting people by introducing them to my friends like, "hey everybody, this is my old friend Veronica, she once punched a homeless guy who said her shoes were ugly." If the random girl I'm referring to as "Veronica" is an interesting person, she'll almost always run with it and I met someone fun. If not, she runs for the door or her boyfriend and I haven't wasted 5 minutes repeating the same boring conversation about music.
My advice to everyone is to ignore the topic of music and develop some character. Be confident and interesting and you don't have to worry about picking "safe" topics to meet people.
Latent craziness is inversely related to musical taste, or at least obscurity of musical taste. Look at the general lyrical ideas:
Pop: "Something sad happened but I didn't let it get me down"
Country: "Something sad happened but I'll get over it"
Indie rock: "Something sad happened and I want to kill myself"
Metal: "Something sad happened and I want to kill you"
There's plenty of sad bastard country out there, but it's not what most people have in mind when they ask "what kind of music do you like?"