We have spent countless hours in front of our screens while taking all sorts of absurd Buzzfeed quizzes to figure out what kind of mermaid, bug, a cat, or a celebrity we could be. All of these results are concluded by our likes, dislikes, food, movie, and song choices. All these quizzes are plain crap, but that does not mean your choices don’t define anything about you. A group of researchers from New York University studied music preferences about psychopathic tendencies to figure out what kind of songs psychopaths prefer to listen to.
The findings of the study placed No Diggity ft. Dre at the top of psychopath scores and Eminem’s Lose Yourself scored closely.
In many TV shows and Hollywood movies, psychopaths are shown to have a preference towards classical music like Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” and Hannibal Lecter in “the Silence of the Lambs”. The research found that music choices do have a relation to psychotic behavior, but it does not necessarily have to be the classical music. The study included 200 people who listened to 260 songs. The greatest fans of Blackstreet’s No Diggity were found to have the highest psychopath scores while Lose Yourself by Eminem trailed closely behind.
The people that scored low on psychopath tests preferred the songs like My Sharona by The Knacks and Titanium by Sia.
Psychopathic disorders affect about one percent of the population. Researchers are looking to identify psychopaths by their choices and behaviors. The team wants to conduct a larger study and perform further tests to figure out if it is possible to identify psychopaths by using their playlists. Pascan Wallisch, the lead researcher, says,
“The beauty of this idea is you can use it as a screening test without consent, cooperation, or maybe even the knowledge of the people involved. The ethics of this are very hairy, but so is having a psychopath as a boss, and so is having a psychopath in any position of power. You don’t want to have these people in positions where they can cause a lot of harm.”
The researchers only disclosed the songs No Diggity and Lose Yourself, but they were not the best predictors of psychopathy. The team has refused to name the other songs as this will disrupt their future experiments. You cannot begin to identify yourself or others by their song choices just yet.
“This work is very preliminary. This is not the end of an investigation, it is the very beginning,” says Wallisch.
Check out this song to see if you like it or not!
Want to guess what the other songs could be? Let us know in the comments.