What Your Taste in Music Says About Your IQ

What does your taste in music say about your IQ? That's the question that Virgil Griffith from Caltech asked himself when he embarked on a study that compared SAT results with people's favorite bands.

The idea was simple. With Facebook, he had people download the ten most frequent "favorite music" at their colleges via that college's Network Statistics page. Then, he asked them to download the average SAT/ACT score from CollegeBoard for students attending that college. The result was a chart that essentially shows what music correlates with what test scores.

Of course, that's not to say that listening to a certain type of music makes you dumb, or means that you're dumb. Correlation doesn't equal causation; however, they do show some pretty interesting results.

So what do smart people apparently listen to? I turns out that Beethoven topped the charts, followed by Counting Crows and Sufjan Stevens. These were followed by Guster, Radiohead, Ben Folds, Bob Dylan and U2. On the other end of the chart, you can find Lil Wayne, Soca and Beyonce.

It's possible that these music choices could also be the result of what wealthier people listen to, since they're more likely to be able to attend higher-end schools. Whatever the case, though, the charts are out there.

You can find learn a bit more about the study for yourself here.

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