Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Categorization in one of the most basic cognitive processes and refers to the assembling of elements (objects, events) with regard to their similarity. Categories are ordered in hierarchies from broad to narrow (e.g., vehicle, car, BMW). In art, categories are differentiated by labelling genres. But genre labels are applied in a more complex, dynamic and highly subjective way. For example, in the context of research relating musical taste to personality, the number of musical genres ranged from seven (North et al., 2005) to 104 (North, 2010). Those sets differed not only in number but also on the level of abstraction and the category width, including broad genre-labels (e.g., rock), narrow genre-labels (e.g., soft rock and hard rock), or the even more narrow categories of substyles (e.g., rock’n’roll, punk, indie, alternative rock, etc.). On the one hand, broad categories might not be differentiated enough to cover taste sufficiently well. On the other hand, a large, detailed range of narrow categories is simply not practical for empirical studies, taking up much time during and causing missing data. Therefore, we ask: Is liking of music related when assessed by broad in comparison to narrow categories or do judgements diverge? In our project we collected liking ratings for music by broad genre categories as well as nested, narrow substyles and assessed the similarities between evaluations. We explore how much information on taste overlaps between hierarchical levels (e.g., are highly correlated), and which measurement contains specific information not contained in the other. We address several issues, such as heuristics of evaluations, consistency of responses comparing evaluations by broad or narrow categories, the coherence of subgenre measures within genres, and the typicality and representativeness of subgenre within genres.