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sonicfan1373 on 23 October 2014
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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.