Certain age groups think the music of today is not as a good as it used to be.
Frank McAndrew, Cornelia H. Dudley professor of psychology at Knox College, explores why this may be.
To the extent that there is a common theme tying my research together, it is that I study human social behavior from an evolutionary perspective. I am especially interested in understanding the psychology of everyday life. Why do we enjoy gossip about celebrities? Why do some people name their children after themselves while others do not? Why are mass shooters almost always young men? My book on Environmental Psychology has been translated into several languages and is recognized as a classic text in the history of that discipline.
I have also become something of a purveyor of psychological science to lay audiences. My blog at Psychology Today Magazine and other op-ed articles have attracted over 25 million readers, and one of my essays even appeared in the playbill of a play on London’s West End
Why Do Old People Hate New Music?
Older people often say that “they just don’t make good music like they used to.” Why do we do this?
Musical tastes begin to solidify as early as age 13 or 14, and they get locked into place pretty firmly in our early 20s. Most of us stop exploring new music entirely by the time we turn 33, and if a song was released when you were in your early teens, that song is likely to remain quite popular among your age group forever.
Curiously, men are even less likely than women to explore new music and listen to new artists as they get older.
There is evidence that the brain’s ability to make subtle distinctions between chords and other musical elements gets worse with age. So, new, unfamiliar songs may in fact sound more alike to older ears than to younger ears.
But I believe that the aversion that older people often have to new music has a simpler explanation: the mere exposure effect.
In short, the more familiar we are with something, the more we tend to like it, and it is the music that we hear when we are young that is most familiar to us. In your teens, you probably spent a lot of time listening to music and discussing it with your friends, and the songs and artists from this time became familiar, comforting parts of your life.
Later, life becomes too busy to allocate much attention to discovering new music, and so we listen to comforting old favorites that connect us to a simpler time and place. With familiar songs, we fill in words and sounds that elude us even when there is a lot of background noise or other distractions.
Also, the teen years are famously turbulent, and the emotions that we experience then are intense.
Strong emotions make for strong memories and strong likes and dislikes—including the music we listen to.
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