Poster 13

The Relationship between Musical Preferences and Personality

Remy Harris

For this research project, my goal was to test the hypothesis that there is a connection between preferences that individuals have in music and their personalities. Past research has shown promising correlations between these two variables. Likewise, there has been an idea widely shared that partners who share the same tastes in music are more likely to have a lasting relationship. I believed that this would connect further to the idea that musical preference provides much insight into the personality of an individual. To test this idea, I set up an online survey that prompted participants to display the type of personality they reflect through the Big Five Personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. I then asked participants questions in order to decipher which forms of music they prefer to listen to. I obtained 61 participants to take part in my survey. Furthermore, I tried to find out if there may be a connection between certain aspects of the personality test taken and musical preferences established for these individuals. This quasi-experiment showed three significant points of data that depict a relationship between specific genres of music and certain personality traits. Therefore, I can reject the null hypothesis that one's musical preferences have no correlation to that individual's personality.

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