Music

Study suggests stupid people love Nickelback and smart people love Radiohead

by Mark Teo

October 23, 2014

Fairly or unfairly, music fans have always been ascribing intelligence to music. For instance, how many college profs—or any others working in other willfully brainy professions—listen to hick-hop? On the flipside, how many feminist-bashing Internet trolls listen to, say, the Silver Jews? It’s prejudicial, to be certain, but admit it: Plenty of us associate certain types of music with certain intelligence levels.

Caltech grad student Virgil Griffith, then, wanted to find out exactly what music dumb people listened to. He surveyed hundreds of American colleges and universities, and managed to link musical preferences to SAT scores. “I’ve listened to artists who after listening to I thought to myself ‘Wow… loving this rubbish says a lot about someone and how much they got going on in their head,’ he wrote on his site. “Could one’s musical tastes say something about intelligence? How about SAT scores? Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality.”

The results from the study were hilarious. Those on the lowest end of the spectrum—a.k.a. the dumbest people, who had an average SAT score of 889—loved Lil Wayne. On the bottom of the spectrum, too, were other mainstream rappers, like Akon, T.I., and Jay-Z. Curiously, plenty of emo bands were popular amongst those on the lower end of the spectrum: The Used, Taking Back Sunday, and All American Rejects all scored highly with those with average SAT scores under 1000. Nickelback—perhaps obviously—was very popular in the lower third of the spectrum.

So, who do those with the highest SAT scores listen to? Well, those who listened to Beethoven scored the highest—on average, they had an score of 1371. But also, indie rock—or, historically, college rock—earned points in the upper percentile: Radiohead, Ben Folds, and Sufjan Stevens were all popular amongst high achievers. Curiously, so were Counting Crows. We don’t get it either.

Then, what of the mushy middle of the spectrum, the vanilla-white, Wonderbread-munching Ohio dwellers? Well, Outkast, Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, and Pink Floyd were all popular with those with average SAT scores.

While it’s easy to make startling conclusions from this study—that Beck fans are smarter than Disturbed listeners, or that Bob Dylan fans are brainier than Doors aficionados—it’s important to know these results aren’t conclusive. There are plenty of factors that go into musical tastes: Intelligence may be one of them, perhaps, but there’s a lot of context to pad out here, too. And, as Griffith himself points out, his study links correlation, not causation.

“Yes, I’m aware correlation [doesn’t equal] causation,” he writes. “The results are hilarity incarnate regardless of causality.”

We agree. Plus, this new Lil Wayne track might be a boner jam, but it’s one helluva boner jam.