Music Taste and Intelligence: Do Smart People Like Different Music? | Riot IQ
Oct 13, 2026·Advanced Topics & Research
Music Taste and Intelligence: Do Smart People Like Different Music?
Music taste and intelligence are weakly linked: test scores correlate about r = .1 to .2 with liking complex or instrumental music, too weak to judge anyone.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
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Music taste and intelligence are only weakly linked: in the best studies, scores on intelligence or vocabulary tests correlate about r = .1 to .2 with liking complex or mostly instrumental music, such as classical and jazz. That is real but small, and it means a person's playlist tells you very little about their IQ.
The popular version of this claim ("smart people listen to classical", "metal fans are geniuses") stretches a handful of correlational studies much further than the data allow. This article walks through what those studies actually measured, how big the effects are in IQ points, why the idea spreads so easily, and which confounds (education, personality, age and class) explain much of the pattern.
What the main studies found
Two lines of research do most of the work in this debate. All are correlational, and none of them measured full-scale IQ with an individually administered test.
The four music-preference dimensions
Rentfrow and Gosling (2003) asked more than 3,500 people, mostly American college students, to rate 14 genres. Preferences clustered into four "dimensions", meaning groups of genres that the same people tend to like:
• Reflective and Complex: blues, jazz, classical and folk.
• Intense and Rebellious: rock, alternative and heavy metal.
• Upbeat and Conventional: country, soundtracks, religious music and pop.
• Energetic and Rhythmic: rap/hip-hop, soul/funk and electronica/dance.
In a subsample of 118 students who took the Wonderlic test, a 12-minute timed reasoning test, verbal ability correlated .19 with liking Reflective and Complex music, .19 with liking Intense and Rebellious music, and -.18 with liking Upbeat and Conventional music. Analytical reasoning scores did not reliably correlate with any dimension (the largest was .08). Note that heavy metal sat in a dimension with a positive verbal-ability correlation, which already complicates the "classical good, everything else bad" story.
The instrumental-music hypothesis
Kanazawa and Perina (2012) tested a specific prediction: that more intelligent people prefer purely instrumental music because, on their evolutionary argument, music was originally vocal and instrumental music is a "novel" taste. Using the 1993 US General Social Survey (786 adults) and the 1986 wave of the British Cohort Study (1,160 sixteen-year-olds), they related a short vocabulary test, scaled to IQ units, to genre ratings.
• US adults: after controls, each additional IQ point predicted a 0.0069-point higher liking for instrumental music on a 1-to-5 scale (standardized beta = .12). Over 15 IQ points, that is about one-tenth of a scale point.
• British teenagers: the equivalent coefficient was 0.0023 per IQ point (beta = .10), and vocabulary scores did not predict liking vocal music.
The "instrumental" category was coarse. In the US data it combined big band, classical and easy listening; in the British data, classical and "light music". The authors themselves wrote that the split was "necessarily approximate at best."
A Croatian study of 467 high school students (Račevska & Tadinac, 2019), using a non-verbal reasoning test, also found intelligence predicted a preference for instrumental music but not vocal-instrumental music. That is a useful replication in a different country with a different test, though it is still a single school-age sample.
How big is the link in IQ points?
A correlation of about .19 means that among people one standard deviation apart in how much they like reflective, complex music, the expected difference in verbal ability is about 0.19 × 15, or roughly 3 IQ points. It also means music preference accounts for under 4% of the variation in test scores (.19 squared is .036).
Standardized betas of .10 to .12 in Kanazawa and Perina's models are smaller still, and they sit next to stronger predictors. In the US sample, age (beta = .29) and years of education (beta = .21) predicted instrumental-music liking more strongly than vocabulary score did.
Put plainly, two people with identical playlists can easily differ by 30 IQ points, and a classical-music fan is only slightly more likely than a pop fan to score above average. Our article on the Mozart effect covers the separate question of whether listening to music changes test scores.
Why the "smart people like classical" idea spreads
The claim has a real kernel, but it gets inflated in predictable ways.
• Headline compression: "verbal ability correlates .19 with liking jazz in 118 students" becomes "smart people listen to jazz". The size of the effect and the narrowness of the sample drop out of the story.
• Cognitive style read as ability: Greenberg and colleagues (2015) linked music preference to "empathizing" and "systemizing" styles in samples of up to 2,178 people recruited through Facebook. People biased toward systemizing preferred intense music such as punk and heavy metal. This was widely shared as a finding about clever people, yet no intelligence test was involved; the study measured cognitive style with questionnaires.
• How people use music: in a sample of 341 people, Chamorro-Premuzic and Furnham (2007) found that people higher in openness and in IQ tended to use music in a rational or cognitive way, for example by analysing how a piece is built, while more neurotic and introverted people used it more for regulating mood. Someone who listens analytically may well gravitate to complex music, so the "why" behind the correlation may be about how a person listens as much as what they like.
• Status signalling: classical music and jazz carry social prestige, which makes a story linking them to intelligence flattering to repeat.
Playing an instrument is a different question from what you listen to, and it has its own, more substantial evidence base. We cover it in our article on IQ and musicians.
Confounds: education, personality, age and class
Several third variables could produce the music-IQ correlations without any direct link between them.
• Openness to experience: in Rentfrow and Gosling's data, openness correlated .44 and .41 with liking Reflective and Complex music, more than twice the size of the verbal-ability correlation. Openness itself correlates about .20 with intelligence in a meta-analysis of 162,636 people (Anglim et al., 2022), so part of the music-IQ link may run through personality.
• Education and exposure: schooling and family background shape which genres a person hears and is taught to value. In the US survey data, education predicted instrumental-music preference more strongly than vocabulary did, even with both in the model.
• Age and generation: age was the strongest predictor of liking big band, classical and easy listening in the GSS data. Older adults also tend to score higher on vocabulary tests, which can create a spurious link if age is not handled carefully.
• The test used: most of these studies used short vocabulary or verbal measures. Vocabulary is a reasonable proxy for general ability but is also heavily shaped by education and reading, which are themselves tied to cultural taste.
No study has tested the link within families (for example, comparing siblings) or followed people's tastes and abilities over time in a way that would separate cause from correlation.
Frequently asked questions
Do smart people listen to classical music?
Slightly more often, on average. Studies find small correlations (about r = .1 to .2) between test scores and liking classical or other instrumental music, which is far too weak to judge any individual.
What music do intelligent people listen to?
All kinds. The positive correlations reported cover classical, jazz and blues, but also rock, alternative and heavy metal in one large study, while liking mainstream pop and country showed a small negative correlation with verbal ability.
Is liking heavy metal a sign of intelligence?
Not on its own. In one sample of 118 students, verbal ability correlated .19 with liking rock, alternative and metal, but that is a modest association from a single college sample.
Does listening to classical music make you smarter?
There is no good evidence that it raises IQ. The original 1993 "Mozart effect" report (Rauscher, Shaw & Ky) concerned short-term performance on spatial tasks, and our Mozart effect article explains why later research has not supported lasting gains.
Can your music taste predict your IQ?
Not usefully. Even the strongest reported correlations mean music preference explains less than 4% of the differences in test scores between people.
The takeaway
Intelligence has a small, real association with musical taste, mostly a slight tilt toward complex or instrumental genres and away from the most conventional pop. The effect is about 3 IQ points per standard deviation of preference at most, and education, age and openness to experience account for much of it. Your playlist is a poor guide to your reasoning ability. If you want an actual measurement, you can take the RIOT IQ test, which is built to estimate reasoning ability directly.
References
1. Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2003). The do re mi's of everyday life: The structure and personality correlates of music preferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(6), 1236-1256. [doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.6.1236](. doi.org
2. Kanazawa, S., & Perina, K. (2012). Why more intelligent individuals like classical music. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 25(3), 264-275. [doi.org/10.1002/bdm.730](. doi.org
3. Račevska, E., & Tadinac, M. (2019). Intelligence, music preferences, and uses of music from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 13(2), 101-110. [doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000124](. doi.org
4. Greenberg, D. M., Baron-Cohen, S., Stillwell, D. J., Kosinski, M., & Rentfrow, P. J. (2015). Musical preferences are linked to cognitive styles. PLOS ONE, 10(7), e0131151. [doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0131151](. doi.org
5. Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Furnham, A. (2007). Personality and music: Can traits explain how people use music in everyday life? British Journal of Psychology, 98(2), 175-185. [doi.org/10.1348/000712606X111177](. doi.org
6. Anglim, J., Dunlop, P. D., Wee, S., Horwood, S., Wood, J. K., & Marty, A. (2022). Personality and intelligence: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 148(5-6), 301-336. [doi.org/10.1037/bul0000373](. doi.org
7. Rauscher, F. H., Shaw, G. L., & Ky, K. N. (1993). Music and spatial task performance. Nature, 365(6447), 611. [doi.org/10.1038/365611a0](. doi.org
Hero image: Das Vinyl dreht sich, by Sulamith Sallmann, CC BY-SA 4.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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