Much to my surprise, liking rock and classical music predicts the same things about your personality: having greater “openness to experience” (a personality trait from the Big Five framework) and being more intellectual.

Makes sense for classical, but who would have guessed that’s true of rock?

Another surprise to me was that enjoying dance/electronic music, country music, and jazz music predicted similar traits: being more group-oriented (e.g., gravitating toward group rather than 1-1 interactions), being more extroverted, and being more spontaneous.

But each of these 3 groups also stood out uniquely. Enjoying country was associated with being more emotional, enjoying dance/electronic was associated with higher openness to experience, and enjoying jazz was associated with being less attention-seeking than the other two groups.

Enjoyment of both pop music and hip-hop was associated with being more emotional, but pop music enjoyers were more group-oriented, whereas hip-hop music enjoyers were more spontaneous.

All the correlations discussed here are between r=0.3 and r=0.45 in size, so they are moderately large. It would be neat to see whether this generalizes to non-U.S. samples.

You can explore all of these music genre correlations, plus over a million more correlations about humans, for free using PersonalityMap: https://personalitymap.io

This piece was first written on May 23, 2025, and first appeared on my website on May 29, 2025.