What Your Book, Film, And Music Taste Says About Your Personality (According To Science)

Recently, I’ve been tearing through Frank Herbert’s Dune books. “I’ve become such a sci-fi girl,” I told a friend yesterday, as if engaging with a mega-successful science fiction franchise rather than my usual mega-successful classics actually said something about my personality.

But, well... does it? 

Well, I don’t know if one book tips the scales. But a 2011 study found that “personality accounted for significant proportions of variance in entertainment preferences” – even more so than demographics. 

This seemed to hold true across listening, watching, and reading habits.

What do our reading, listening, and watching habits say about our personality? 

The researchers looked at the preferences of 3,227 participants across 108 music, film, book, and television genre labels (including terms like “action,” “comedy,” and “jazz”). 

These labels were then grouped into five content types by the researchers, like “communal” (social, warm content, like “music television, comedy, reality television”) and “aesthetic” (e.g., classical music, foreign films, and poetry).

Not only did they find that “individuals prefer genres that share similar content irrespective of the medium through which it is conveyed,” but also that these preferences “related moderately to age and ethnicity, and related strongly to sex and level of education”. 

Here are the results for each of the five preferences: 

1) “Communal” content

In this study, a preference for communal content, which included pop music, reality TV, and romantic and cooking-related reading material, seemed to be linked to higher agreeableness and was modestly linked to extraversion.

Fans of “communal” content may be less adventurous on average, the paper read. 

2) “Aesthetic” content

Fans of aesthetic works, including “abstract, dense, and demanding” works like poetry, classical, and jazz music, as well as foreign films and arts TV, seemed to be more intellectual, creative, introspective, empathetic, and calm.

They may be good leaders.

3) “Cerebral” content 

This can include reading business, news, and current event TV content, as well as watching documentaries. 

Liking “cerebral” content was linked to more ingenuity, creativity, and intellect in this paper, as well as extroversion. However, it was negatively linked to cooperation with others. 

4) “Dark” content 

This included punk and metal music as well as horror films and books. 

Liking “dark” content seemed to be linked to creativity, ingenuity, and extroversion, though it appeared to be less associated with conscientiousness and agreeability. 

“Individuals with preferences for the Dark entertainment factor may generally see themselves as defiant, reckless, and immodest,” the researchers wrote. 

5) “Thrilling” content 

“Thrilling” works covered “action, adventure, suspense, and fantasy”-based media. 

This was a bit of a wild card. “There was no consistent pattern of correlations between the personality facets and Thrilling preferences,” the researchers wrote. 

In fact, some of their research clashed. “For example, ingenuity, competence, and quickness (all facets of Intellect) were positively related to the Thrilling factor in the Internet sample, but negatively related in the community sample,” the paper said.

“The connections between personality and the entertainment-preference dimensions suggest that people seek out entertainment that reflect and reinforce aspects of their personalities,” the study concluded.