Tags
10 favorite songs, favorite music, personality test, psychology, sam gosling, snoop what your stuff says about you, the big five personality traits, what music says about you
I’m reading the book “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You” by Sam Gosling. The author does research on how your stuff reveals your personality, particularly along the lines of The Big Five personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. (They spell OCEAN, which makes them easier to remember.)
Gosling covers a lot of stuff about stuff and personality in the book, so much that I’m never going to remember all of it, but he does provide interesting exercises that help the reader pin down his or her own personality.
One of my favorite exercises is to make a list of ten favorite songs. Music, apparently, is very good at revealing personality. When Gosling has his students do this exercise, the other students in class can very easily figure out which list of favorite music goes with which student.
Of course I had to make a list of ten favorite songs, but it wasn’t easy. While I can pin down the bands without much trouble, sometimes there were several songs from one band that I liked equally. Here’s my list for today. (I can’t promise that tomorrow’s list will be exactly the same.)
1. Hold Back the Rain – Duran Duran
2. Human – The Killers
3. Dodo – Dave Matthews
4. Very – Moby
5. Don’t Change – INXS
6. The Voice – Ultravox
7. Ih-Ah! – The Devin Townsend Project
8. Original of the Species – U2
9. Grace of God – Flogging Molly
10. Only – Nine Inch Nails
Now that I’ve given you a glimpse of my personality, is there anything about this list that reveals something unexpected about me? Or is it a pretty good representation of who I am?
Your turn! Please share your favorite ten songs in the comments, on Facebook or on your own blog. If you share on your blog, let me know in the comments so I can check it out.
Here are ten among my favourites in no particular order:
- Windmills of Your Mind – Dusty Springfield
- It Was a Very Good Year – Frank Sinatra
- Morning Has Broken – Cat Stevens
- Solitaire – Neil Sedaka
- Heart like a Wheel – Linda Ronstadt
- Cat’s In The Cradle – Harry Chapin
- Scarboro Fair – Simon and Farfunkel
- Old Man – Neil Young
- Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues – Danny O’Keefe
- Night Fever – Bee Gees
Hi, Christopher – Thanks for sharing your favorite songs. Your list in comparison to mine and the ones my high school cohorts shared on Facebook makes me wonder if these lists of songs can also help snoops figure out the age of the person with each list. I remember most of the songs on your list from when I was a child, but a number of my favorites are from my high school to college years.
Mz. Woo
“….makes me wonder if these lists of songs can also help snoops figure out the age of the person with each list…….”
Of course my list dates me, in the way our lists date all of us.
I, for instance, came into the world during the last few months of the War (WW2 – The Big One, that is). So you might think that stuff from the ‘sixties would dominate my list.
But it doesn’t, as I explain in my *own blog entry* that your blog entry inspired me to write.
I may just do another entry with another 10, which could be quite different in taste and time from my current list. I’m nothing if not protean!!