Your Taste in Music Can Reveal How Smart or Dumb You Are (SAT Scores Correlation)

Can your music taste determine how smart or dumb you are? Virgil Griffith has mapped musical tastes of college students with their intelligence levels determined by the SAT score.

Virgil Griffith, popularly known for the Wikipedia Scanner that detects where the Wikipedia edits are coming from, maintains another very interesting project that maps musical tastes of college students with their intelligences levels (determined by their SAT score).


The x-axis represent the SAT score while the colored boxes indicate the music genre and the artist / composer.




Music That Makes You Dumb

Fans of Lil Wayne‘s music scored the lowest in SAT while listeners of Beethoven‘s work were among the highest scorers. The full chart is available at Virgil Griffith‘s website.

To come up with this chart, Virgil used Facebook to determine the “Favorite music” of students in different colleges in the US and then combined their taste with the average SAT scores of students from these colleges. Smart.


The musical taste vs SAT score chart maps the 133 most popular (out of 1,455) favorite music from 1,352 schools. In terms of music genres, it follows like this – Soca < Gospel < Jazz < Hip Hop < Pop < Oldies < Raggae < Alternative < Classical < R&B < Rap < Rock < Country < Classic Rock < Techno in increasing order of SAT scores.

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