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Forums - Music Discussion - Study: Dumb people listen to Beyoncé and Smart people listen to Radiohead

I'm all for putting a vote in for Guster.

Ganging Up On the Sun is one of the best CD's ever.



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ethomaz said:
I don't know if I'm smart or dumb.

I listen both.


Maybe you are the dumbest smart person or the smatest dumb person :P

I'm with you on that, I got a lot of songs in the middle, some in the right and some more to the left. Come one, dumber people prefer The Doors? I call this biased!!



Smart people don't have facebook ;)



I have not commented on VGChartz for a while but this really warrants a comment.

This study is correlational and in no way indicates causation (ie, listening to Beyoncé has no effect on your intelligence, and your intelligence does not directly dictate the type of music you listen to). Since this study was not conducted in a laboratory setting, there can be a number of extraneous variables that have not been taken into account. Here are a few things that this study does not take into account, which could have an effect:

-Socio-economic background (the level of education in lower income regions varies drastically with areas with higher-income families; it is very possible that the economic situation of kids effects the type of music they have access to or listen to)

-Gender (this is very important since this is the SAT; women have a tendency of doing better than men overall in math coursework, and they generally do the same as men in tests, but do somewhat worst in the SAT [this has actually become a major source of criticism against the SAT])

-Racial and ethnic background

Another major issue is that the sample they used (a group selected from one University) is no where large enough to be representative (I would expect a huge Standard Error rate from this study).

Hence, the statement made in the article that, "Radiohead really truly is music for smart people", is incorrect since there is no direct link between intelligence and listening to Radiohead.

What this study has to do in order to find a potential link, if there is any, is get a random sample of people in a lab, the sample must then randomly (without knowledge of experimenter of who goes in what group) be assigned to three groups. One group will do an intelligence test (IQ, but there are others) after listening to Beyoncé (or other Hip-Hop), the second group will do an intelligence test after listening to Radiohead (or other experimental Rock band), the third group will simply do an intelligence test without listening to any music (Control group). This experiment must be repeated several times, with different pieces of music, in order to for us to tell for certain if the type of music you listen to has an impact on your intelligence.



Don't know why they even bother with these studies. The men in our vanity-obsessed society aren't going to tell the truth. I will, though. I don't listen to any 2014 mainstream music. I'm happy listening to The Guess Who.



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The SAT isn't really a good measure of intelligence. Especially if you grew up in an area that didn't educate you properly, you would end up with a lower score than if you were taught better. Your actual intelligence would be the same but you would get a better score. Plus, correlation does not imply causation anyway.



I listen to Beethoven.



MDMAlliance said:
The SAT isn't really a good measure of intelligence. Especially if you grew up in an area that didn't educate you properly, you would end up with a lower score than if you were taught better. Your actual intelligence would be the same but you would get a better score. Plus, correlation does not imply causation anyway.

I think studies have shown that SAT scores are poor predictions of how well you do in college. At best, they can predict 1st semester performance, but they're way off when predicting the entire undergrad performance. Not to mention, the SAT is more of a test of taking tests than a test of intelligence.



That list is pretty much all over the place and doesn't really tell much of anything. Also, that chart is a terrible way to present the data.

Also, who cares?



Beethoven comes under 'miscellaneous'?

This study is dumb.