Daily Archives: November 22, 2006

In the past I’ve poked fun at the earnestness with which users of MySpace and other websites list their favorite bands. Looks like they were onto something. It turns out that people give and receive a lot of information about each other when they share their musical preferences.
Here is an article summarizing a study about this phenomena. It’s dry at times, so I’ll summarize it: People, and especially young people, judge each other with some degree of accuracy based on a person’s musical taste.
Message in a Ballad
The article focuses on the participants perception of psychological traits such as extroversion. That may have been a good fit for their study method. However, my suspicion is that, when it comes to musical taste, people are more likely to be making social judgments about a person’s ideology, lifestyle, political views, social group, and that sort of thing.
What do you think?