Musical Matches

I completed (well as much as I wanted to do) the Musical Oldies Personality Project for the Vistage 1107 group.  Each member was instructed (naturally there were some renegade non participants) to pick their favorite song for each year from 1962 to 1982.  I promised that I would analyze the data and analyze their personality based on the selections.

The research ("The Do Re Mi;s of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of Music Preferences" by Rentfrow and Gosling - University of Texas at Austin) was a gold mine of information.  Rentfrow and Gosling mentioned work by Mehl and Pennebacker (2003) that found individuals listened to music during approximately 14% of their waking lives.  So music is important to people!

It wasn't hard to see musical personality preferences (even without their stories and explanation of picks) among the 10 Vistage members who participated.  I'm sure I had some advantage in nine years of hearing personal stories from four of my Vistage buds. But even for our newer members, I could easily see some personality traits within their selections. 

Even more fun was coming up with the common matches among the network nine responses: