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? "

Music Is Universally Enjoyed

[Petersko]

People might enjoy a wide variety of music, or they may have narrow tastes. But I've never met anyone who hated all music.

I know people who hate television and movies, calling them "useless time-wasters". I know people who don't like ice cream and hate dogs. I even know somebody who hates nearly everybody else. But music is different. Some people don't notice it much, but even they know what they like.

People know that their musical choices are very personal. If you ask what kind of music they like, they get a chance to talk about themselves. And many are proud of their musical taste. It's like fine wine. Some people are connoiseurs, and some just drink whatever is available. And a wine expert generally just LOVES to talk about wine.

For anybody who thinks that showing disdain for some form of music somehow increases their credibility on the subject, remember this: nothing turns off somebody else faster than saying their favorite band/artist sucks.

Re:For those that missed that joke:

[bfischer]

http://poll.imdb.com/title/tt0080455/quotes [imdb.com] "Oh, we got both kinds. We got country *and* western."

Re:A human being != a personality

[Rycross]

Some of us out there have a really hard time making friends. You are able to just make friends because you've passively learned the social protocols for doing so. They've become second nature to you. But there are a lot of people out there who, for one reason or another, never really learned the proper protocols, or haven't learned them to the degree that they are able to make friends easily. Woe be to you if you're one of these people and an adult. It effects every area of your life, and you are given almost no opportunity to learn by doing. People tend to not want to put up with socially awkward people in their inner circle. There's some very real value in being able to study behavior to make up for lost time, and apply those lessons to our own behavior, so we have some hope of fitting in.