In our first Social Psychology class, I asked students to write something unique about themselves on an index card (as a way of getting to know them). I then asked if they had
any questions about me. I was asked about what my favorite concert was, a question I enjoyed answering.
A recent article in the Huffington Post covers some research by Sam Gosling and colleagues showing that knowing someone’s musical taste gives us some pretty decent information to guess their personality (link to the PDF of their Psychological Science article). It also covered some recent research that shows it tells us whether we might like the person.
we often ask people about their musical preferences because musical taste serves as an easy indicator of whether we are likely to be similar to new people in ways that will influence how much we like them.