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? "

Comments

Music is "easy"

[lonechicken]

Once you get past the introductions and the "I like everything except rap/metal/country (choose your typical singled out genre)", there's still plenty to talk about. Songs in general have a good combination of easy to understand qualitative concepts that extend beyond "this is better than that" to discuss. There's also the element of, "Hey we both like this ___, have you tried listening to ___?" Movies are the same way (as shown in that poll), though I'm a little surprised music beat movies by that much.

Re:Music is "easy"

[kthejoker]

There are a lot of reasons music is much better at judging than movies:

1) Music comes in much smaller and more discrete bites, and therefore more can be judged faster.
2) Music is easier to say "Yes" or "No" to. Most movies fall in grey areas, where you didn't like it, "but it had redeeming values" (or, corollary: it "wasn't perfect but it was still really good"). In short, people don't qualify their music tastes as much as their movie tastes.
3) Music, because it is generally easier to create, as a whole has a much larger spectrum. So niches are easier to find (and accentuate.) Again, more music means more niches.
4) And finally, music (again, because it's easier to create and has more niches) is more divided sociologically than movies are. When someone says, "I like country & western and I can't stand rap", they are making as much a statement about their sociological identity as they are about their music tastes. Someone who says "I like comedies, but I can't stand thrillers" isn't making the same kind of statement. And more to the point, there's nothing sociological that precludes someone from enjoying Pirates of the Caribbean or Superman Returns. For music, that's a lot less true.

In short, cinema as a whole must cater to drawing in as many fans as possible. Music simply doesn't need to cater to the whole, because the niche in and of itself can sustain music. Movies are "for the masses"; but if you don't like one thing of music, you can just try another.

Great idea for next /. poll

[ciaohound]

"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

Ugh.

[swid27]

Well, that's probably (another) reason that I manage to have a hard time creating memorable "hooks" with other people; I have practically no interest in keeping up with or finding new music. (It isn't that I don't enjoy nearly all forms of music, mind you, it's just that, for me, there's approximately zero value in seeking out new things to listen to.)

On a related note, the common geek tendency to disparage everyone who doesn't have the same eXtreMely obscure/not-yet-trendy/running counter to current popular opinion taste in music as he/she does is very lamentable. Seriously, most people don't use their taste in music to define themselves, so judging people on that is very narrow-minded.

shit

[ArmorFiend]

Psychologists have talked about the importance of body language, physical appearance and clothing.

Physical appearance and clothing matters?! Now that's what I call News for Nerds.

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Comment removed based on user account deletion

A human being != a personality

[Lazerf4rt]

How do we make friends and get to know other people?

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.

Definitly nothing profound

[TinBromide]

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.

Re:Likes country: emotionally stable

[j00r0m4nc3r]

I like BOTH kinds of music. Country AND western...

Hey baby, are you alliance or horde?

[bugnuts]

If they can't answer "What level is your character?" without flinching, it's DATE OVER.

Re:It's easier than thinking

[Monsuco]

It's much easier to say you like some crappy indie band in order to get inside a girl's pants.

Yep, she likes the indie music, I like whats indie pants.

Re:I don't think there's anything profound here.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

The awful truth

[sean_ex_machina]

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?"