Introduction
Music is something that has existed for almost as long as humanity itself has existed. From being used to teach, used in religious rituals, for entertainment, or to tell a story, music is an important part of human development. Over the last few centuries, music has been transformed from an art form shared amongst the elite, to a fundamental aspect of pop culture that is distributed and enjoyed worldwide in an instant with the use of technology. Music is such a widespread phenomenon, yet it is also very personal to each individual. For this reason, this essay aims to discuss how and why people develop unique tastes in music, focussing on the socio-cultural level of psychological analysis.
Schema theory
One socio-cultural factor that affects an individual’s psychological development is theorised to be the cultural environment in which they were raised. The specific characteristics of the cultural environment lead to different groups of organised information in the brain, or ‘schemas’ being developed in different people.
Schema theory was introduced to the world of psychology by Frederic Bartlett. Bartlett proposed that people have schemas – packets of grouped information – that represent an individual’s generic knowledge about the world. It is theorised that schema development coincides with cultural upbringing, as the environment a person is raised in and the cultural values that they hold may make their schemas different to those of other cultural backgrounds.
One example of this theory in action is supported by a study published by Josh H. McDermott, Alan F. Schultz, Eduardo A. Undurraga and Ricardo A. Godoy in 2016 in the science journal Nature. To explore the dilemma of nature versus nurture in terms of development in musical taste, the researchers focussed on one of the fundamental aspects of music – consonant and dissonant sounds. In the Western world, consonant sounds are considered ‘pleasant’ and dissonant sounds ‘unpleasant’. However, it was debated as to whether this was a universal phenomenon, which would suggest that musical preference is biological and innate, or whether the ‘pleasantness’ of a sound varied in different cultures, which would suggest that musical preference is socio-culturally determined.
The experiment involved the Tsimane’—a native Amazonian society with very low exposure to Western culture—compared to participants in Bolivia and the United States that varied in exposure to Western music. Participants were asked to rate the ‘pleasantness’ of sounds. Although they were able to determine the differences between the different sound qualities, the Tsimane’ rated consonant and dissonant chords and vocal harmonies as equally pleasant, unlike the two other groups, the Bolivian city- and town-dwellers, showed significant preferences for consonant sounds, albeit to a lesser degree than US residents. The results demonstrate that consonance preferences can be absent in cultures sufficiently isolated from Western music, and are thus unlikely to reflect innate biases or exposure to naturally harmonic sounds. This variation in preferences suggests that culture has a significant role in developing a person’s preference in music.
The findings of the study may suggest that the Tsimane’ participants have developed a different schema associated with enjoyable sound and music compared to the Bolivian and American participants. However, more research would be needed to determine whether schema theory can actually be applied to the difference in preference between consonant and dissonant sound. In addition, the comparison of consonant and dissonant sounds as a way of explaining a person’s taste in music may be too simplistic of an approach. This is because music relies not only on sounds and harmonies, but also on volume, rhythm and speed, which could be other factors that lead certain people to prefer a particular style of music.
Conformity
Another principle at the socio-cultural level of psychological analysis is the idea that humans’ behaviour is influenced by the people around us, whether it be directly or indirectly.
Solomon E. Asch’s work investigating conformity, using the ‘Asch’s paradigm’ experiment design, is one of the most famous examples demonstrating conformity. Conformity is a social phenomenon where people feel the need to change in belief or behaviour in order to fit in with a group, whether it be through active or passive peer pressure.
Today, popular music is dominated by sales to teenagers and young adults due to the rise of digital sales, music videos and social media advertising. It is also a well-known fact that puberty is a time when conformity is found to be most prevalent and strong. Thus, could there be a psychological link between a teenager’s desire to conform and their taste in music?
A study carried out by Gregory S. Berns, the chair of Neuroeconomics at Emory University aimed to understand more about the neurological and behavioural mechanics of social influence on decisions when purchasing music. The researchers’ question of focus was: “When people change their behaviour based on social influence, is it their actual preferences that change, or simply their behaviour?”
The researchers studied teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17, a social group thought to be easily influenced by society, and known to buy at least one third of albums in the USA (in 2010). The participants each heard a short clip of a song that was trending on the social-media network Myspace. Afterwards, they were asked to make two ratings; one indicating how familiar they were with the clip (which was always the hook or chorus of the chosen song) and one indicating how much they liked the clip, on a scale from 1 to 5. The clip was then played a second time, and they were again asked to rate how much they liked the song. However, two thirds of the participants were shown a popularity rating that was estimated based on the number of times the song was downloaded when they listened to the clip a second time.
The third of participants who were not shown a popularity rating the second time they heard the clip changed their preference rating of the song 12% of the time. Likewise the two thirds who were shown the popularity rating changed their ratings more frequently, on average 22 percent of the time. In addition, of the participants who changed their rating after the second listening, 79 percent of the time they changed their ratings in the direction of the popularity rating – in other words, they followed the crowd and demonstrated conformity.
These observational findings coincided with previous research on conformity, and demonstrated that conformity is still prevalent amongst the average American teenager. However, they do not address whether or not the participants were actually “following the crowd” or, after further reflection and information from their peers, they actually changed their preference of their own accord. To investigate this dilemma, Berns et al. looked to brain activity to further their study.
Using the first rating of the songs, it would be possible to locate a network of brain regions that related to participants’ reports of how much they liked each song. If, after they changed their minds in the second rating, this network appeared again, then it would suggest that the adolescents really did change how much they liked the music based on the influence of their peers. However, if a different network of regions shown brain activity in the scans following a change in likability rating, this would agree with the idea that the participants were simply conforming with their peers’ taste in music.
Music preference, based on the participants’ initial ratings was strongly related to activity in the head of the caudate nucleus. – an area of the brain that most psychologists agree is highly related to reward and valuation. It appears to reflect enjoyment, not familiarity. The researchers also observed neurological activity in other areas of the brain that have been previously associated with the pleasurable aspects of listening to music.
When teenagers changed their ratings, according to their brain activity, it had nothing to do with increased liking of the music. Instead, the network of regions associated with changing a rating included bilateral insula, the anterior cingulate cortex and the supplementary motor cortex and frontal poles. These regions of the brain are believed to be closely involved with anxiety. These regions all showed increased activity when teens were shown a popularity rating that did not match their own, meaning that they had this neural response prior to changing their own rating. Participants who demonstrated the greatest sensitivity to popularity, as determined by survey measures taken at the beginning of the study, produced the strongest insula activity when they conformed after listening to the clip the second time. These results suggest that the greater the insula activity, the higher the chance of conformity.
The results of this study support the idea that music taste is not entirely unique to each person, but rather that it develops under the influence of peer pressure. In the teenage years, perhaps music taste is developed as a result of conformity rather than innate, biological factors.
Social identity theory
There is evidence to support the idea that a person’s music preference and their social identity are psychologically linked. The work of Henri Tajfel, which led to the creation of social identity theory in 1979, could be another socio-cultural factor that plays an important role in the development of a individual’s music taste.
Tajfel (1979) proposed the social identity theory – the idea that the social groups which people belong to are an important source of pride and self-esteem. The theory states that in order to increase an invidivual’s self-esteem, they enhance the status of the ‘ingroup’ to which they belong and attribute negative characteristics to the ‘outgroup’ where they do not belong.
Musical genres often have social groups (or subcultures) surrounding them. For example, people who live in towns like, Nashville, Tennessee, in the Southern United States, where there are thriving country communities, tend to grow up being exposed to much more country and blues music than those who live in the Northern United States. These communities have a strong identity attached to the culture surrounding country music; this may cause members of these communities, or ‘ingroups’, to prefer country music far more than other genres. For this reason people may develop preference for certain music genres over others because they feel they belong to a particular social group whose music preference makes up part of their group identity.
Likewise, music styles also change depending on the time in history. The drastic socio-cultural changes that occurred following World War II in all participating and surrounding countries led to the rise in ‘pop culture’. An important aspect of pop culture is popular music of the age. Although the concept of music as a consumer product was already emerging by the 15th century, with musical eras like Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic coming and going over the centuries, it was not until after World War II that musical styles began to expand and change much more quickly than ever before. Each decade from the 1950s is widely known to the general population as having its own distinct style of popular music. Thus, the characteristics associated with members of these generations, or social groups, including the type of music preferred by members of the ingroups, could be considered a demonstration of social identity theory.
A recent study conducted by Dr Rachel Taylor and Dr Dan Bowers of the University of South Wales aimed to explore the relationship between musical stereotypes and the social identity processes that underpin them. In the first study participants were asked to choose 10 words from a list of 60 to describe the fanbase of their favourite music genre. They were questioned on 4 music genres. The researchers found that there were trends in the words chosen to describe the different music genres, and that each fanbase seemed to display a unique identity.
Fans tended to describe themselves in the following ways:
• Rock fans: “Highly committed”
• Classical fans: “Intelligent and emotional”
• Rap fans: “Extroverted”
• Pop fans: “Positive disposition and generally good”
The researchers conducted a second test where they asked classical, rock and pop fans to choose 10 words to describe the fans of rap music. They then compared these to the descriptions that rap fans gave when describing themselves. The researchers found that classical, rock and pop fans described rap fans in a far less positive way than rap fans described themselves, which could be evidence of social identity theory at work.
The outgroups (the non-rap fans) described rap fans as being “less intelligent”, “less committed”, “less emotional” and as “having more of a negative disposition” than when the rap fans chose words to describe themselves. These results suggest that people judge others based on the social groups they are members of, and that ingroup descriptions are likely to be more positive than outgroup descriptions.
This natural human desire to belong to a social group that possesses positive characteristics in order to raise self-esteem may be one of the reasons why a person’s social identity is one of the factors affecting a person’s music taste.
Counter claim
However, a study published in the journal Science contradicts this idea that taste in music is environmentally and socially developed, and suggests rather that it is innate. The study demonstrated that patterns of brain activity can indicate whether a person likes what they are listening to. The physically observable results shown in the study may provide evidence that music taste relies more on genes and brain structure rather than upbringing.
Valorie Salimpoor, a researcher at the Rotman Research Institute,Toronto, conducted a study in which participants listened to 60 music clips they had never heard before while their brains were scanned in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. The 19 participants were asked to say how much money they would spend on each music clip to demonstrate which piece they most preferred. Although 19 is a very small sample size, this is rather common for studies involving technology like fMRI scanning as it is more expensive and difficult to conduct that other forms of experimentation. However this small sample size may mean that the music preference shown by participants from observing brain activity may have been due to confounding variables rather than cognitive or biological factors.
The study focussed on an area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is involved in forming expectations. According to Salimpoor, there was a network of activity in the nucleus accumbens that could be observed from the fMRI scans that showed how the brain predicts whether or not a person wants to buy the music they are listening to. The higher levels of activity in the nucleus accumbens, the more money participants said they were willing to spend on any particular song in the experiment, which was designed to replicate an auction.
Thus from this study one could conclude that the correlation between neural activity in the nucleus accumbens and amount of money participants were willing to pay for a song shows that music preference is influenced by biological and cognitive factors, rather than socio-cultural factors. On the other hand, the small sample size of this study makes this a weak counter-argument as the results of the study cannot be generalised upon the entire population. Therefore it may be better to consider biological, cognitive and socio-cultural factors as all being significant and influential in the psychological development of a person’s taste in music.