Category: Personality

Modern technology means it’s never been easier to hear exactly the music we want, whenever we want it. But whatever technology we use, the reasons we listen to music are universal.

Music grabs our emotions instantly in a way few other art-forms can manage. It engages us on all sorts of different levels. A few bars of a song can take us back decades, to a different time and place.

So what are the universal psychological functions of music? Lonsdale and North (2010) asked 300 young people about their main reasons for listening to music to see which came out top. Here are the answers, in order of importance, counted down from six to the number one spot.

6. To learn about others and the world

Languishing down at number six was the way in which music teaches us about the world. Music tells us stories about other people and places and it gives us access to new experiences. Music can teach us how other people think and even suggest how we might live.

Psychological research backs up the importance of the information music sends out to others about our personalities. In one study participants could broadly judge another’s personality solely on the basis of their top 10 songs (see: personality in your mp3 player).

Music is also sending us a message about the state of the world. Dodds and Danforth (2009) downloaded the lyrics to almost 250,000 songs composed between 1960 and 2007. They found the lyrics got steadily more depressing up until 1985 and then levelled off around 1990. This decline was seen across all musical genres.

5. Personal identity

In at five is identity. The type of music we like expresses something about ourselves. Even the broadest genres like rock, classical and blues begin to give us a picture of a person. We also seem to discover ourselves through music: it can teach is who we are and where we belong. Through music we can build up and project an image of ourselves.

One general trend in popular music is towards greater narcissism. A study has examined the lyrics of the top 10 songs in the U.S. between 1980 and 2007 (DeWall et al., 2011). This found that lyrics related to antisocial behaviour and self-focus increased over the period. On the other hand, over the same time, lyrics related to positive emotions, social interaction and a focus on others have decreased.

4. Interpersonal relationships

The fourth most important function of music is its social dimension. Music is a point of conversation. We listen to it while we’re with other people and we talk to them about it. It’s a way of making a connection.

There’s little doubt that music and love are inextricably linked and we use one to get the other. One study tested whether exposure to romantic music makes a woman more likely to agree to a date Gueguen et al. (2010). The answer is, emphatically, yes. The percentage of women who agreed to a date almost doubled from 28% to 52% after they had been played some romantic music.

The song that did the trick? “Je l’aime à mourir” (I love her to death) by Francis Cabrel (the research was conducted in France).

2= Negative mood management

Tying for the second spot is negative mood management. When we’re in a bad mood, music can help us deal with it. When your mood is low, there is something cathartic about listening to sad music. Somehow it helps to know that you’re not alone. We use music to relieve tension, express our feelings and escape the realities of everyday life.

Music certainly seems to help us cope with life’s slings and arrows. There have been many studies on those about to undergo painful medical procedures. These find that music helps people get through this stressful and anxious time (e.g. Good et al., 2002).

2= Diversion

Also coming in at number two is diversion. Music relieves the boredom of the commute, or of a lazy Sunday afternoon. It’s something to do when we don’t know what else to do.

A word of warning though: don’t use background music while you’re trying to do something complicated. Research shows that it reduces performance on standard cognitive tests (Cassidy & MacDonald, 2007). Music is a distraction and this research found that the most distracting type is depressing music.

1. Positive mood management

Right up at the top of the charts is positive mood management. This is rated people’s most important reason for listening to music: making our good moods even better. It entertains us, relaxes us and sets the right emotional tone.

Music makes us more hopeful, even after things go wrong for us. In one study by Ziv et al. (2011) participants were falsely told they’d done badly on a task. Those who were played some positive music afterwards, were more hopeful about the future than those left in silence.

Image credit: Kris Krug

From time to time we all wonder what other people think of us. Often in a quiet moment, just before going to sleep, while reviewing the day, we try to work out how friends and family might interpret what we’ve said and done.

How neurotic does my partner think I am? Do my colleagues think of me as a reliable, hard worker? Do my friends think I’m stuck in a rut or open to new experiences?

Here on the inside we have a model of ourselves that makes sense, but out there, what conclusions are those who know us best drawing about our personalities?

Of course we all differ and you might imagine that the differences between actor and observer would cancel out. For example some people might appear more conscientious than they are, and others less so.

How do friends see you?

When psychologists compare people’s ratings of their own personality with those of others, they find something curious. There are consistent and reliable differences between how people, on average, see themselves and how those closest evaluate them.

Estonian psychologist Juri Allik and colleagues gathered personality tests on participants across Europe; from Belgium, The Czech Republic, Estonia and Germany (Allik et al., 2010). People were asked to fill out one personality questionnaire themselves, and get someone who knew them well to do the same.

Here are the five different dimensions into which personality is most often broken down, along with brief descriptions:

• Extraversion: assesses how outgoing you are, for example do you love or hate parties?
• Neuroticism: centers around the dark thoughts you might have about yourself and others.
• Openness to experience: measures how much you like trying out new ideas or activities.
• Agreeableness: looks at how easy-going you are.
• Conscientiousness: do you get things done or is your to-do list overflowing?

Despite the differences between the four cultures examined, the pattern of results was remarkably similar. When Allik and colleagues compared what people thought of themselves compared with their friend’s judgement, some consistent differences emerged. Here’s what they found, on average, across all the participants:

• People were rated as less neurotic by those close to them than they saw themselves. This could suggest we appear less anxious, depressed or self-conscious than we feel.
• People were rated as more conscientious by others, having greater competence and self-discipline than they gave themselves credit for.
• People were rated as less open to experience, including to fantasy, new ideas and values, than they thought of themselves.
• For agreeableness and extraversion people were generally in agreement with their friends.

To rule out the conclusion that there’s something unusual about Belgians, Czechs, Estonians or Germans, Allik and colleagues looked at similar data taken from 29 cultures, including the United States, Japan, India and Burkina Faso (in West Africa).

Broadly the same pattern of results emerged, which suggested that people all around world share this same tendency to see themselves as more neurotic and self-conscious and less open to experience than they are rated by friends and family.

Battle of the biases

None of the differences that emerged were huge, but they were consistent. And it’s the exceptions that are fascinating because they are tricky to square with people’s natural tendency for self-enhancement, i.e. most people think they are above average. If that were true we’d expect to see people rating themselves higher on conscientiousness and lower on neuroticism than their friends.

One way to resolve this apparent contradiction is to notice who the comparisons are between. In the experiments where people consider themselves above average, the comparisons are between strangers.

But, in Allik et al.’s study, the comparisons are between friends and family. Because our friends and family naturally have a positive bias towards us, they may rate us higher than a stranger on socially desirable personality traits.

The finding from Allik et al.’s study that doesn’t fit with this explanation is the lower rating others gave for openness to experience. Because being open to new experiences is socially desirable, if this theory is correct, we’d expect the same positive bias from our friends. It’s certainly a hole in that particular explanation so we can’t yet be sure exactly how to explain these findings.

The researchers conclude that, on average, our friends and loved ones have much the same view of our personalities as we do. Perhaps we are a little pessimistic on neuroticism and conscientiousness, maybe a little optimistic on our desire for new experiences. But in broad-brush personality terms, the real you is probably shining through.

Image credit: Gueorgui Tcherednitchenko

Research examining people’s perceptions of politicians suggests voters go for candidates with similar personalities to their own.

The evidence comes from studies of both American and Italian voters in recent presidential and prime ministerial elections. Perceived personality might even influence voters more than a politician’s programs or policies.

The research, conducted by Professor Gian Vittorio Caprara and colleagues from the University of Rome and R. Chris Fraley at the University of Illinois, was published in the Journal of Political Psychology. It examined both American and Italian voters in Presidential and Prime Ministerial elections respectively:

• John F. Kerry versus George W. Bush in 2004: 6,094 American voters completed questionnaires on their own perceived personalities and those of the presidential candidates. The results showed that people perceived themselves as having more similar personalities to their preferred candidate.Kerry was perceived by voters as more open-minded than Bush, and voters who voted for Kerry felt the same way about themselves. Bush was seen as particularly agreeable and conscientious although the results were less clear-cut than those for Kerry. The authors suggest Bush benefited from a ‘positivity bias’ because he was the incumbent.
• Romano Prodi (centre-left) versus Silvio Berlusconi (centre-right) in 2006: The same personality survey of 1,675 Italian voters showed they perceived themselves as more similar to their preferred candidate.Burlusconi was seen as more energetic and outgoing (extraverted), which is how those voting for him saw themselves. Prodi, however, was seen as more friendly and, similarly, his supporters saw themselves as more agreeable.

These findings are in line with previous studies that have found voters are, on average, less influenced by policies and programs than they are by their personal similarity to the candidates. Similarities in attitudes are particularly important in promoting liking, so that people vote for those who share similar attitudes to their own. This study extends these finding to personalities.

To social psychologists this makes perfect sense as there is a long history of research into how similarities promote liking. People are more inclined to like those who have similar values, beliefs and even share demographic variables with themselves.

Of course politicians and their campaign advisors know very well that voters often choose on the basis of personality. The question for them is: how can the candidate appear to be all things to all people?

From their study the authors suggest that the most important personality characteristic for candidates to exude is agreeableness. This is because it is agreeableness that people are most likely to rate highly in themselves. If people’s voting choices are really heavily swayed by perceived similarities in personality then it is agreeableness that should win out at the polls.

The study was published in the journal Political Psychology (Caprara et al., 2007).

So far in this series on the top ten psychology studies, the research has lumped us all together in one group and asked what psychological research says about all of us. The studies have asked questions about how people’s emotions, memories and perceptions work.

What they haven’t asked is what can psychologists tell us about the systematic differences between people? To answer this question I have to break the pattern just this once and include two studies, from two apparently warring factions of personality psychology.

Eysenck and the personality

The first is one of the earliest studies in a long line of research by Hans Eysenck. Eysenck was influenced by Greek philosophy in his search for human personality. The Greeks thought there were four categories of person: the melancholic , the sanguine, the choleric and the phlegmatic. Eysenck, instead of thinking people could be pigeon-holed this neatly suggested people could be described on a sliding scale of each of these factors. He had a hunch that personality differences between people could be described on two ‘dimensions’. “Extraversion is the degree to which a person is outgoing and neuroticism is the degree to which they are emotionally stable (or not).”These dimensions were introversion versus extraversion and neuroticism versus stability. Extraversion is the degree to which a person is outgoing and neuroticism is the degree to which they are emotionally stable (or not).

If you imagine these two dimensions at right angles to each other then you have a big cross with four quadrants on which everyone’s personality falls somewhere. For example, if you are highly introverted and highly neurotic, you are an extremely anxious person. On the other hand if you are highly neurotic but extraverted then you would be an hysteric (Hampson, 1988).

Eysenck (1944) tested this theory by using information from 700 patients at a military hospital. He asked their treating psychiatrists to rate patients on a number of scales which included ‘degraded work history’, ‘sex anomalies’ and ‘dependent’ along with a host of others. From these he used a technique called factor analysis from which these two dimensions of introversion/extraversion and neuroticism/stability emerged.

“Eysenck made an exciting, bold statement…”When you think about it, Eysenck made an exciting, bold statement: every human’s personality can be classified on just two sliding scales. Since then personality theory has moved on and now theorists have settled on five sliding scales. This scale is going strong and appears to describe some of the systematic ways in which people differ. Well it would do, if there wasn’t one rather large fly in the personality psychologist’s ointment: the situation.

Mischel and the situation

In 1968, Walter Mischel dropped a bomb on personality theory with his innocuously titled study, ‘Personality and Assessment’. Mischel thought the evidence showed tests such as Eysenck’s were almost worthless because they didn’t take into account the situation. “what is a personality test really telling us about a person?”It is clear, he argued, that people behave quite differently depending on the situation. Imagine you’re late for an appointment, you’re sitting in huge traffic jam, do you behave the same way as when you’re sitting at home, relaxed? It not, then what is a personality test really telling us about a person?

Mischel (1968) reviewed a series of studies that attempted to predict people’s behaviour from their personality scores. He found there was little consistency in people’s behaviour across situations. In fact, he concluded there was as little as 9% of agreement between the way people behaved in different situations. Or, put the other way around 91% of the differences in people’s behaviour in different situations couldn’t be accounted for by personality tests.

Situation versus personality

The work of both Eysenck and Mischel was crucial in forming what became a massive debate in psychology. Mischel’s particularly, as it made many psychologists ask what was the point of studying personality if it predicted so little. “Eysenck was saying you are what’s inside, your personality, and Mischel was saying you are what is outside, the situation.”These two studies don’t just encapsulate the debate about personality and the situation but also highlight another constant battle in psychology, between the power of internal and external forces, your own thoughts and feelings versus those of society. Eysenck was saying you are what’s inside, your personality, and Mischel was saying you are what is outside, the situation.

It doesn’t take a genius to point out they were both right in their own ways. People do seem to be different in certain aspects, for example some people are more sociable than others. But people also show remarkable similarities in certain situations, e.g. their need to conform. The trick is in finding the balance between the two, a problem at which psychology is still working hard. Nevertheless, both Mischel and Eysenck’s work gave an important insight into what it means to be human, what it means to be an individual.

Image credit: Haags Uitburo

Apparently 30% of companies in the US now use personality testing as part of the recruitment process. Is it a useful tool or load of old baloney? This article highlights some of the common advantages and disadvantages.

Like any tool, it depends how you use it. The article mainly describes their use in hiring unskilled or semi-skilled labour. I would suggest there is a feeling among management of conserving effort when hiring ‘low-level’ staff. If this is the case, then the danger is in placing too much trust in the test.

Either way, with personality testing still on the march, it’s all the more reason to find out now what you’re prospective employer will be finding out about you.