Personality Traits Linked To Artistic Taste

Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 23 Jul 2009 - 3:00 PDT

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Your favourite painting could reveal a lot about your personality, this is a conclusion of a study published today, 23rd July 2009 in the British Journal of Psychology, which found that people's preferences for painting genres is linked to key personality traits.

In the largest study ever conducted into the psychology of art preferences, Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and a team from Goldsmiths, University of London, examined the artistic preferences of 91,692 participants recruited through the BBC website, to investigate whether specific personality traits are linked to the liking of particular genres of painting.

The participants, aged between 13 and 90, filled out online personality questionnaires and rated their liking for paintings from six artistic movements - abstract, cubism, northern renaissance, Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, impressionism and secular Islamic art.

Dr Chamorro-Premuzic said: "We found some interesting patterns of preference between the big five personality traits - openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism - and also when we looked at factors like age and sex."

The strongest personality trait linked to art preference was openness - people who scored high on openness gave the highest levels of liking for all the paintings. "This was in line with expectations, as people with high openness scores tend to be imaginative and creative and seek out new experiences, while low scorers are down-to-earth, and more practical in nature," Dr Chamorro-Premuzic continued. "However, they also liked the more conventional artistic movements, like impressionism, less than others. Previous research has shown that openness is linked with unconventional attitudes and counter-conformity, and it seems that the artistic choices of open people reflect this."

Results also showed that more conscientious people liked all of the paintings less than most - which supports previous research which found that conscientious people are less interested in art generally.

People who scored high on the traits agreeableness and conscientiousness tended to show a preference for impressionism. People high in extraversion liked cubism more than most, and men liked cubism more than women. Male and younger individuals tended to prefer renaissance paintings.

Dr Chamorro-Premuzic continued: "Factors like age, upbringing and experience of art will have a large influence on a person's artistic taste, however regardless of these factors, our findings suggest that certain personality traits lead people to show interest in the arts, and to like certain artistic movements more than others."

Source
British Journal of Psychology

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