Two separate studies have shown that those with psychopathic tendencies are more likely to favour rap music over other genres.
The first of these was commissioned by Channel 4 and involved gathering data from over three million Britons. Issues with the veracity of online surveys aside, the results show that psychopaths favour rap music – and read the Financial Times, too, for what it’s worth.
The second study was by a team at New York University, who studied the listening habits of 200 people. Those with the highest psychopath scores were fans of Blackstreet’s ‘No Diggity’ and Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’, with ‘My Sharona’ by The Knack and ‘Titanium’ by Sia appealing to those who were deemed the least psychopathic.
The NYU team behind the work are yet to publish their findings, stressing that this preliminary research before launching into a major study, but they hope a taste for certain songs could help predict, and police, those with psychopathic traits.
“The media portrays psychopaths as axe murderers and serial killers, but the reality is they are not obvious; they are not like The Joker in Batman. They might be working right next to you, and they blend in. They are like psychological dark matter,” said Pascal Wallisch, who lead the NYU research.
“You don’t want to have these people in positions where they can cause a lot of harm. We need a tool to identify them without their cooperation or consent.”
You may have heard alarm bells sound during the last part of that quote – this is a troubling notion. As the Columbine trial and the West Memphis Three tragedy have shown, using musical taste as a barometer for evil can be hugely damaging, and studies like these — while offering up interesting information — give us an excuse to easily categorise and penalise people based on an unscientifically-proven system. It is akin to a witch hunt.
As the Guardian points out, even gene variants that have been proven to be more common in psychopaths are by no means predictive of the disorder.
Wallisch’s attitude is troubling, especially considering he basically stumbled into the results while doing a volunteer study on musical tastes, when he became aware many of the participants had also sat the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale, which ranks psychopathic traits. He combined the results, identified key songs, and is now saying things like: “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.”
At least he is aware of the moral shortcomings.
“The ethics of this are very hairy”, he admits. “But so is having a psychopath as a boss, and so is having a psychopath in any position of power.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r7_jtEpmjA
