Study aims to identify psychopaths based on their music taste

Could a person’s music taste actually reveal more about their psychotic tendencies? The boffins at New York University certainly seem to think it’s a possibility, having conducted studies in the hope that they can establish a correlation between psychopaths and their music genre of choice. 

Although the results are preliminary and unpublished, The Guardian reports that a team of scientists at the university are intrigued by their current findings. In a study of 200 people who listened to 260 songs, the highest psychopath scores were dished out to classic hip-hop tracks a la Blackstreet’s ‘No Diggity’ and Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’. On the other side of the scale, volunteers with less psychotic tendencies were more likely to favour The Knack’s ‘My Sharona’ and Sia’ ‘Titanium’. 

Although it all sounds a bit trivial, there’s method in the researchers’ ahem, madness. The end goal of the study is to establish whether psychopaths have a preference for certain songs, which in theory would mean they would be easier to identify.