British scientists from Queen Mary University of London, together with their Spanish colleagues, discovered that musical preferences can reflect a person’s moral values. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine PLOS One.
The experts’ conclusions are based on the results of an experiment involving 1,480 people. They filled out surveys to measure their attitudes toward the five pillars of morality: compassion, justice, loyalty, authority, and moral purity.
Psychologists then studied the volunteers’ musical tastes by selecting each participant’s five favorite songs and analyzing their acoustic properties and lyrical content using machine learning algorithms.
The results showed that people who value care and fairness prefer compositions dedicated to support and joy. Those who attach more importance to authority, loyalty and purity prefer songs about love, morality and justice. This suggests that lyrics tend to resonate strongly with people’s ideas about morality.
It also turns out that the acoustic properties of the songs play an important role. Those who supported loyalty, authority, and purity were more likely to prefer music that was loud, danceable, and more positive. And people with individualizing values ​​such as compassion and justice tend to choose compositions with smooth acoustic qualities and calmer rhythms.
“The main finding of this study is that people tend to align their musical preferences with their moral worldviews and beliefs,” said Vjosa Preniki, the study’s lead author.
Psychologists before I learnedWhat moral prohibitions collapse first under the influence of alcohol?
Source: Gazeta
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