The Relationship Between Musical Preferences, Personal Values and Personality Traits

Abstract

The main goals of this research were to explore the relationship between music preferences, Schwartz's personal values and Dark Triad traits, as well as to investigate whether there are stereotypes on listeners of specific musical genres. There were 510 participants, Croatian students, in the first part of the research, focused on exploring the mentioned relations. Participants completed the musical preference questionnaire constructed for the purpose of this research, the Short Dark Triad (Jones & Paulhus, 2014) and Portrait values questionnaire (Schwartz et al., 2001). In the second part, 115 participants from the first part of the study estimated the typical fans of specific music genres in a questionnaire constructed for this research based on the Dark Triad questionnaire and Portrait values questionnaire. The results have shown a low-to-medium correlation between the Dark Triad and personal values, as well as low and in most cases insignificant correlation of music preferences with the Dark Triad and personal values. The results also point out the existence of stereotypes of an individual's characteristics based on their preferred music genre, which were especially negative towards fans of turbofolk music.