The taste of music you like reveals you psychological behavior

According to thousands of Buzzfeed quizzes, your music taste can say a lot about you. From the songs you choose, these quizzes can tell which Harry Potter house you belong to or what era of Kylie Minogue your fashion sense is. Of course, it’s all nonsense.

However according to a new – more scientific – study, if you are a big fan of No Diggity ft. Dre, you’re more likely to be a psychopath.

It’s not often you get to embed No Diggity on a science website, so we’re taking advantage of this opportunity.

A stereotype in films is that psychopaths always listen to classical music (e.g. Hannibal Lecter) or Phil Collins (Patrick Bateman in American Psycho). However, according to research conducted by Channel 4 in the UK, on over 3 million participants, people who score highly on psychopath tests are more likely to favor rap and heavy metal, with the least psychopathic favoring classical music and jazz.

Now researchers at New York University have looked at specific songs, studying 200 people and 260 songs, The Guardian reports.

They found that people who scored highly on psychopath tests were more likely to rate songs like No Diggity and Lose Yourself by Eminem. People at the least psychopathic end of the spectrum were more likely to be fans of My Sharona by The Knacks and Titanium by Sia. Two songs you should now claim to love with passion

The aim of the research was to find a way of identifying psychopaths. The researchers believe that songs could help predict who has the disorder, which affects around 1 percent of people.

They told The Guardian that further tests are needed, and they want to conduct a larger study. They hope to find out whether it might be possible to identify psychopaths from their playlists.

“The beauty of this idea is you can use it as a screening test without consent, cooperation or maybe even the knowledge of the people involved,” Pascal Wallisch, the lead researcher, told The Guardian. “The ethics of this are very hairy, but so is having a psychopath as a boss, and so is having a psychopath in any position of power.”

“You don’t want to have these people in positions where they can cause a lot of harm.”

No Diggity and Lose Yourself were named by the researchers, but other songs were better predictors of psychopathy. The scientists declined to name these songs for fear of disrupting future experiments. We’re guessing Galway Girl by Ed Sheeran.

To be clear, you shouldn’t diagnose yourself based on your musical taste. If you’d like to read more about how psychopaths are diagnosed by trained medical professionals, see this Hare Psychopathy Checklist.

IFL Science

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