Why so many angry audiophiles?


Just wondering. Music is supposed to soothe the soul. If you are in reasonably good health for your age, have a good system and good music to play on it you have it pretty good it seems to me. These are blessings! Be thankful for what you got?

Just a thought.  That's how I see it.
mapman

Showing 1 response by geetee1972

I am almost certain that the answer is because most audiophiles score lower than average on what psychologists define as trait agreeableness.

 

Agreeableness is the degree to which your behaviour towards others is motivated by the desire to like and be liked by other people. As a highly agreeable person, if you don't agree with someone you are more likely to just smile and say something nice rather than pick a fight with them.

 

Agreeableness correlates strongly with an interest in people - so the majority of individuals who work in people or care giving fields such as health care, hospitality, teaching etc, score higher than the average for the population on trait agreeableness.

 

Lower levels of agreeability correlate strongly with an interest in things - so the majority of people who are engineers, mechanics, industrial designers, inventors etc score lower and agreeableness than the average for the population.

 

Audiophiles tend to be the latter and therefore don't tend to smile sweetly when they disagree with someone, they tend to say what they think and say it with a sugar free coating!

 

As an additional insight, the most disagreeable people in the world, say the bottom 4%, are close to 100% of the prison population! They are also almost exclusively men whereas the top 5% of the most agreeable people in the population are exclusively female.

 

Men and women differ on agreeableness by about 1.5-2SD depending on which tool you use to make the measurement. It is why the majority of audiophiles and most engineers are male and the reverse is true for teaching, nursing, hospitality etc.

 

There are some very robust papers that explore the idea of ‘Men with things, women with people’ if you care to look for them.