Musical taste and the representativeness heuristic
Access Status
Authors
Date
2011Type
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Source Title
ISSN
Collection
Abstract
The present research investigated how people judge the musical taste of others. In Study 1, participants were asked to judge the likely musical taste of 10 fictional individuals. Participants’ judgements of musical taste exhibited a common bias in keeping with stereotypes of musical taste; this bias was believed to stem from the use of the representativeness heuristic. Study 2 confirmed this, showing that an individual’s similarity to stereotypical music fans, rather than base-rate estimates of musical taste, was significantly related to predictions of their likely musical taste. This suggests that an individual’s relative similarity to stereotypical music fans might act as a heuristic ‘rule of thumb’ used by people to quickly and economically judge their likely musical taste.
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Lonsdale, A.; North, Adrian (2017)Musical taste is believed to function as a social "badge" of identity that might develop according to a process of "self-to-stereotype matching". For this reason, individuals were expected to like musical styles that are ...
-
Krause, A.; North, Adrian (2018)Previous research on contextual correlates of musical taste have considered microlevel influences extensively, but they have yet to consider macrolevel factors, such as time of year. The literature concerning seasonal ...
-
Lonsdale, A.; North, Adrian (2009)Musical taste is thought to function as a social ‘badge’ of group membership, contributingto an individual’s sense of social identity. Following from this, social identity theory predictsthat individuals should perceive ...