Have you ever wondered what your music taste says about how clever you are? Well, some scientists have.
A 2026 study by psychologists in Germany and Switzerland tried to answer this question by comparing listening data from 185 adults with their scores from online tests of general cognitive ability.
They found that more intelligent participants tended to listen to songs with sad or emotionally complex lyrics.
This appeared to be independent of genre; there was no evidence that more intelligent people listened to classical music, for example, or that less intelligent participants preferred pop or rock.
This builds on work by psychologists Prof Peter Rentfrow and Prof Samuel Gosling in 2003, who found that musical taste clusters into four broad categories: reflective and complex (classical, jazz, blues), intense and rebellious (rock, metal), upbeat and conventional (pop, country) and energetic and rhythmic (hip-hop, dance).
They found that the category you preferred correlated much more strongly with your personality traits than it did with your intelligence.
For example, people who prefer reflective and complex music are more likely to have high openness to experience and curiosity.
Curious people who want to learn about the world tend to read, travel and seek out enriching experiences – a tendency that also shapes their musical taste.
And contrary to some unfair stereotypes, it isn’t that country or trance music makes you stupid, rather that people who like them are more likely to be motivated by the hedonistic thrill of the dance floor, or the social interaction of chatting with friends.
Whereas people who like music with deep, melancholy lyrics are more likely to spend time in introspection or learning new things.
We should be careful not to read too much into this, though. The 2026 study involved a small sample of German adults, and there were several confounding factors, including age, that were not accounted for.
Ultimately, intelligence is a very nebulously defined characteristic that’s influenced by all kinds of factors, and music preferences are as much about identity and group belonging as they are about measurable cognitive ability.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Harper Edwards, St Albans) 'What does my music taste say about my intelligence?'
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