Psychopaths probably like Bieber more than Bach, according to unusual study
Researchers wanted to find out if a preference for certain musical genres was correlated with psychopathy, a personality disorder characterised by manipulativeness and a lack of empathy
Despite the film industry’s depiction of psychopaths, classical music is not their go-to soundtrack in the real world.
“In the movies, if you want to establish in one shot that a monster has a human side,” said Pascal Wallisch, a psychology professor at New York University, filmmakers play a certain kind of music. There’s Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange or Mozart in The Silence of the Lambs.
Wallisch and Nicole Leal, a recent graduate of NYU, wanted to find out if a preference for certain musical genres is correlated with psychopathy, a personality disorder characterised by manipulativeness and a lack of empathy.
The researchers gave a questionnaire to more than 190 NYU psychology students that rated their level of psychopathy. It includes questions such as, “For me what’s right is whatever I can get away with” and “Love is overrated”.
“The cliché is they (psychopaths) are all in prison, but they’re all over,” Wallisch said.
The students listened to a songs from a wide range of musical selections, from classical to recent Billboard 100 songs, and rated them on a seven-point scale.