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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? "
I hate shit like this. Question: Do you want to know how to make friends, or do you want to make friends? Because when you start to look for the secret procedure behind friendship, you start looking at people as if they were abstract personalities, with some quanitifiable set of properties, and you stop looking at them as human beings. And this attitude can prevent you from actually connecting with them. It's completely absurd. Not everything is meant to be turned into cold science.
they said the average age was like 18. What do 18 year olds have to talk about with random peers? If you mix an accountant and a construction worker, they may have similarities in that they may have kids, be sick of the boss, have funny co-worker stories.
Most 18 year olds don't have profound achievements that have a commonality. If you have kids, you don't mind hearing about other people's kids. If you're in physics club, you probably don't want to hear about a wrestling match.
Studies also show that teenagers blow at empathetic responses, so it harder to tell if someone is interested by subtle clues. If someone follows along on the conversation, its a go... So music is the most common ground shared by all teens.
Except me, i really didn't ever listen to the radio.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?