By Baylee Pulliam

Classical music is for smart people. Country music is for dumb people. These kinds of stereotypes have long been applied to the genres of music people listen to.

Virgil Griffith, a graduate student at California Institute of Technology, took the average SAT scores of students at various colleges, obtained from The College Board, and compared them with the aggregated Facebook data about students’ musical tastes at those schools.

Results showed that Beethoven fans top the chart, with an average SAT score of 1371. Lil Wayne fans bring up the rear, with a not-so-impressive average score of 889.

While Griffith’s data establishes a trend between music tastes and SAT scores, some say that it is more likely indicative of shared personality traits. For example, people who like classical music are more likely to be ambitious, hard working and inquisitive.

“Music can indicate personality, like whether or not you are able to handle complexity,” said Dr. Michael Cunningham, a psychologist and communication professor at the University of Louisville. “If you listen to music with complex harmonies, lyrics and structure, you’re more likely to be able to handle complex problems like math equations and to find solutions.”

According to Cunningham, certain musical genres are naturally more complex than others.

“Let’s face it,” said Cunningham. “Beethoven is more complicated than country western.”

Many of the most complex music artists – Beethoven and other classical composers – are among the favorites of the highest SAT scorers in Griffith’s data.

According to Griffith, those with the lowest scores overwhelmingly preferred pop, rap and country artists.

However, as with any rule, there are exceptions.

Zach Smith likes pop music and is also an honors student.

“I feel that I am an intelligent person,” said Smith, a junior liberal studies major. “I placed 11th in my graduating class in high school and performed very well on my ACT.”

Smith scored a 30 on the ACT, a score roughly equivalent to an SAT score somewhere between 1320 and 1350. According to Griffith’s data, a score in this range would make him an avid Beethoven fan.

Another study encountered similar contradictions in comparing music tastes and personality.

Dr. Adrian North, professor of music psychology at Heriot-Watt University, and Dr. David Hargreaves, director of the Centre for International Research on Creativity and Learning in Education, surveyed 36,000 people in six different countries.

Research revealed that there were common personality trends among listeners of a particular kind of music: jazz fans were creative, rap fans were aggressive and indie rock fans had low self-esteem.

However, when Hargreaves and North looked closer, they found that some of these categories overlapped – many fans of classical music were also fans of heavy metal.

“We think, what we think the answer is, that both types of music…have something of the spiritual about them – they’re very dramatic,” said North and Hargreaves in their book, “The Social and Applied Psychology of Music.”

However, Griffith’s data shows that those who preferred classical music scored significantly higher on the SAT than those who preferred heavy metal, indicating different intelligence levels. Several similar contradictions can be found between the two data sets.

According to Cunningham, this is likely because people appreciate music for different reasons.

For example, Cunningham points to the Eagles, a band combining complex harmonies with country influences. Cunningham said that the Eagles fans’ middle-range SAT scores are probably an average of two separate fan bases.

“The Eagles have a split fan base,” said Cunningham. “They have some that like them because they sound country and then they have some that follow them because of the complexity. If you average their respectively low and high scores, you’d probably get one somewhere in the middle.”

While the data is not entirely clear, Smith said that he does not believe there is any correlation between intelligence and musical tastes.

“I usually feel it is more of a anti-mainstream thing, with people saying that pop music isn’t good,” said Smith. “Even if the people aren’t saying anything against our intelligence directly, they are saying we have bad taste.”