Fans Love Musicians' Personalities as Much as Their Music (IMAGE)
Caption
Why do you like the music you do? You would think that it is because of the music itself. But that's only half the story. Surprisingly, the other half of the story doesn't have much to do with music at all. A new Big Data study from Bar-Ilan University and Columbia Business School found that the musician's personality plays a large role, as well, in listener preferences. The study, published today in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was conducted by team of psychologists from four major universities and led by Zuckerman Scholar and musician Dr. David Greenberg, from the Interdisciplinary Department of Social Sciences and Department of Music at Bar-Ilan University, and Assistant Professor at Columbia Business School Dr. Sandra Matz. By analyzing the public personas of famous musicians and bands, and the personality traits of their fans, the team showed that people prefer the music of artists whose public personalities are similar to their own - an experience they've dubbed the "self-congruity effect of music." This figure depicts five graphs showing the personality of fans for each of 50 musicians. The blue to pink color spectrum indicates low to high average scores.
Credit
Greenberg, Matz, Schwartz, & Fricke (2020). The self-congruity effect of music. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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