Science can determine some pretty wild stuff. Why, just last year, a devoted fan was able to use statistics to work out which Radiohead song is the saddest (because you were dying to know, right?), but now thanks to Facebook, we’ve been able to find out just which personality traits seem to align with popular musicians.
If you’ve been following the news lately, then you might have heard about the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which it was revealed that US politicians have been using the Facebook data of millions of users to target specific ads towards them based upon their likes and interests.
Sure, this might sound a bit dry and non-musical, but you might just be wondering “What else does Facebook know about me?” Well, as it turns out, they probably know you better than you know yourself.
As The New York Times reports, a study was undertaken in 2015 by Stanford University and Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Center in which they used a Facebook app called myPersonality to learn more about Facebook users. The Times described this app as “a 100-question quiz developed by the Psychometrics Center that assessed a person’s openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.”
As it turns out, those who took the quiz allowed access to their Facebook profiles by the app, which managed to cross-reference the results of the quiz with the user’s Facebook likes, thus using a model to predict behaviour based on what people liked on the social service.
So what did the study find? Well, in addition to determining that those who partake in activities such as running, cooking, and travelling were more conscientious than those who enjoyed programs such as Adventure Time and Skins, the study also detected a few musical correlations too.
Specifically, the study revealed that people who listen to music by artists such as Björk and Tom Waits tend to be more open, while those who listen to acts such as Jason Aldean and Luke Bryan tend to go in the opposite direction.
Likewise, fans of Placebo, The Smiths, and Bring Me The Horizon tend to be rather neurotic, while fans of Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, and Judas Priest tend not to be very agreeable. Meanwhile, fans of Counting Crows tend to be the most agreeable, while fans of bands like Nightwish tend to be much more introverted than fans of hip-hop and EDM. Isn’t science amazing?
Check out The Smiths’ ‘This Charming Man’:
