What’s New in Psychology
Musical Taste and Intelligence
Jim Windell
I heard my first jazz when I was 10 years old. I was hooked. However, I had little access to listening to jazz until I was older and could buy records. In my high school days, I perpetually had an album by Miles Davis, Chet Baker or Gerry Mulligan tucked under my arm and bullied my friends into listening to the music I adored.
What I couldn’t understand was how my friends could be so unenthusiastic about jazz. I couldn’t get enough of it; they, on the other hand, could take it or leave it – mostly leave it. Although I love classical music, enjoy pop music, and go to bars to listen to blues artists, still I listen to jazz every day. And I still don’t understand why some people don’t like it and some say they don’t understand it.
Until I ran across a study in the journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. Now I get it. I’m more intelligent than those who say they dislike jazz. Or, at least that’s the way I interpret this study.
Researchers, led by Ph.D. student Elena Racevska, who is in the Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, at Oxford Brookes University in England, explored how musical taste connects to intelligence using a nonverbal IQ test and detailed questions about music habits.
In this study, Racevska and Tadinac combined the approaches of evolutionary and social psychology to investigate the relationship between intelligence, music preferences, and uses of music. They collected data from 467 high school students by administering the Nonverbal Sequence Test, the Uses of Music Questionnaire, and the Scale of Music Preferences.
In the article, published recently in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, the authors note that music preferences are often a very important part of a person’s identity. Music preferences have been found by other researchers to be correlated with a number of variables, some of which include gender; personality traits; conformity; life satisfaction; the need for relatedness; and the importance of religion, music, and nationality in a person’s life.
Although music is generally a way for people to experience emotions, some studies have shown that there is a relationship between music preferences and intelligence. This notion first gained researchers’ attention in the context of Gardner’s (1983) intelligence theory. Among the eight mutually independent types of intelligence Gardiner proposed, musical intelligence found its place, as a reference to people’s differing sensitivity to various musical properties (such as pitch, tone, and rhythm), and the ability to perceive and appreciate them.
An interesting contribution to the research of music preferences, according to the authors, comes from Kanazawa’s Savanna-IQ interaction hypothesis. The Savanna principle says that modern humans’ environment consists of two types of stimuli: the evolutionarily familiar – the stimuli that have been present in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), and the evolutionarily novel – the stimuli that have not been present in the EEA. While the former were omnipresent and comprised situations that were encountered by our ancestors on a regular basis (e.g., food or mate selection), the latter occurred more sporadically. The individuals who were endowed with an early version of what we now consider to be general intelligence are hypothesized to have been better at understanding such situations and dealing with them.
Kanazawa’s Savanna-IQ interaction hypothesis proposes that general intelligence evolved as a module of the brain, which is in charge of dealing with such nonrecurring problems. The individuals with higher general intelligence should therefore, the researchers in this study hypothesized, be better able to deal with novel stimuli.
Their study confirmed this. They found intelligence to be a significant predictor of the preference for instrumental music, but not of the preference for vocal-instrumental music. Furthermore, they revealed the significant role of cognitive use of music as a predictor of the preference for instrumental music. After conducting factor analysis of the Scale of Music Preferences, five factors were revealed: reflective, popular, conservative, intense, and sophisticated. The study suggests that the cognitive use of music is significantly correlated with the preference for instrumental music, as well as music of reflexive, intense and sophisticated factors.
Dividing music styles into mostly instrumental and mostly vocal-instrumental, the findings of this research concludes that people with higher intelligence test scores have a higher preference for instrumental music styles, while no such difference was found in the case of the preference for mostly vocal-instrumental music.
To read the original article, find it with this reference:
Račevska, E., & Tadinac, M. (2019). Intelligence, music preferences, and uses of music from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 13(2), 101–110. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000124
