Study uncovers link between musical preferences and our inner moral compass

From the study:

> From the perspective of the lyrics’ linguistic cues, we saw that people who value more foundations related to Care and Fairness (Individualising values) prefer artists whose songs’ textual content is about care and joy.

Those concerned more about Loyalty, Authority and Purity (Binding or ingroup) foundations tend to choose artists whose songs’ lyrics talk about fairness, sanctity, and love. Also, individuals with strong ingroup values tend to prefer artists whose lyrics have positive sentiments and talk about dominance. This is intelligible as individuals who value Binding and their social groups tend to engage in group activities such as sports, religious events, and political gatherings, which often make use of music to promote messages of power, unity, and victory (e.g. sports chants, church choirs, etc.). On the other hand, participants with high Binding scores tend to dislike songs with negative valence, violent narratives and songs that resonate with sadness, fear, and disgust.

From an audio perspective, we saw that participants with Binding values preferred more artists whose songs are danceable, loud and with more positive sounds. In contrast, participants with Individualising values chose more artists whose songs are smooth, acoustic and have less dynamic sounds. Based on the correlation and statistical significance, timbre and pitch classes displayed important information about the link between individuals’ music choices and moral values. Binding foundations showed higher correlations across timbre and pitch dimensions, whereas Individualising foundations showed higher correlations to pitch classes. Individualising values showed a somewhat negative correlation to the dominant pitches (with values closer to 1), implying that people who value Care and Fairness prefer smoother rather than louder and dynamic music, which is in line with the findings from the higher-level musical features. Binding values had mostly positive correlations with timbre dimensions; however, it only showed a negative correlation with the averaged timbre 11 and 12 and the averaged first-order difference of time 9. We found that these particular timbre dimensions were dominant in hard rock, metal indie, pop, and electronic music (see Timbre subsection in the Materials and Methods section). This implies that individuals who value Loyalty, Authority, and Purity might prefer artists with more conventional and rhythmic songs and dislike those with rebellious, loud, distorted songs.