First Impression(ism)

Vincent van Gogh Self-Portrait

Source: Public Domain

“If they’re responding to your work, and your work is really personal, then reading you is another way of meeting you. Isn’t that right?” —David Lipsky (to David Foster Wallace)

"To write about me is nothing like it is to be with me. Never had a persona. Never needed one. Never will." —Lana Del Rey

Art has myriad functions in life, but one crucial and time-honored tenet is that art is a form of self-expression. Indeed, the question above—posed to the late David Foster Wallace—states an assumption that we can learn about an artist from her art. The other side of this particular blade is that anything that is widely construed as personal self-expression is open to (occasionally uncomfortable) misinterpretation, as inspired Lana Del Rey’s response to a critic who appeared to be making assertions about her personality from her art.

I came across each of these reflections on the connection between a person and her art due to my own general interest in music and literature, but it was my general interest in being understood and misunderstood that brought them together in my mind. And while I could muse at length about my personal beliefs regarding the tendency for our personalities to leak into artistic expression, I will leave that work to better-equipped philosophers and cultural commentators. What I do instead is consult the scientific literature.

To what extent does art represent the person who creates it? People scour the social landscape for clues to others’ personalities in creative ways, both intentionally and unintentionally, and psychologists are no exception. We have investigated the extent to which personality can make itself evident in social media (Back et al., 2010), in our physical surroundings (Gosling, Ko, Manarelli, & Morris, 2002), in our handwriting (Furnham, Chamorro-Premuzic, & Callahan, 2003), even in the condition of our shoes (Gillath, Bahns, Ge, & Crandall, 2012). However, the question of whether personality manifests itself in art has received relatively little empirical attention.

That is not to say that the connection between who we are as people and our aesthetic interests hasn’t been of interest to psychologists. It has.

For example, some data indicate that classical musicians who play stringed instruments tend to be more introverted—and percussionists more extraverted—than people who play brass or woodwinds (Builione & Lipton, 1983). No personality differences were detected when comparing various pieces (guitar, vocalist, percussionist, bassist) of rock and country outfits (Dyce & O’Connor, 1994). Results from that same study suggest that popular musicians are more extraverted, arrogant, and dominant than the average person. In another similar study, however, researchers found that rock musicians were more neurotic and open to experience (and less conscientious and agreeable) than population norms (Gillespie & Myors, 2000).

These studies focus on comparisons of samples of people to other samples of people: How does the average Canadian bar musician differ from, say, your typical college student? But our question is whether the particular manner in which the individual engages with the artistic endeavor is reflective of that one specific person’s general thoughts, emotions, or actions.

A considerable body of research (which warrants its own future blog post) has recently sprung up around individual differences in music preferences—that is, are certain kinds of people more attracted to certain kinds of music? Some work has resulted in systems of classification for music preferences (Rentfrow, Goldberg, & Levitin, 2011) and demonstrated connections between those and personality characteristics (e.g., Nave et al., 2018). For example, did you know that extraverts tend to prefer unpretentious music?

More generally, others have investigated the connection between personality and preferences for various styles of painting, finding that more agreeable and conscientious individuals tend to like impressionism, whereas more extraverted individuals like cubism (Chamorro-Premuzic, Reimers, Hsu, & Ahmetoglu, 2009).

But again, these questions are tangential to our current interest. In other words, the two preceding paragraphs serve as a long-winded way of saying that while people are interested in the intersection of personality and art, we haven’t systematically studied this exact question.

Thus, the next question is how to approach the problem? I would turn here, as I often do, to Egon Brunswik’s (1956) Lens Model approach as it applies to person perception. The basic setup is that a given stimulus or set of stimuli (in this case, a work of art, but in other cases, one’s handwriting, personal website, or bedroom) provides potential insight into another’s personality. But the beholder of the mediating cues (as present in the work of art) must make accurate connections between those cues and the personal characteristics of the individual in question (the artist).

Diagram of Brunswik's Lens Model

Source: Andrew Beer

Thus, we have to perceive dirty socks and correctly connect this to a slovenly bedroom occupant. How does one accomplish this in the case of works of art? What are the observable features in a song, painting, or novel that might connect back to the artist’s personality, intentionally or unintentionally? In visual art, perhaps it’s the use of color, depth, the extent of realism, or abstract content? In literature, perhaps it is the emotional tone or complexity of language?

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As luck would have it, we do have one empirical lens model study examining the perceptions of individuals based on their creative writing (Küfner, Back, Nestler, & Egloff, 2010) in which the positive emotion, creative expression, social orientation, and sophistication of the writing served as cues to modest accuracy in perceptions of openness to experience and agreeableness. These were not necessarily artists, but it is encouraging that at least something about their personalities could be gleaned from stories they concocted in a laboratory setting.

Rentfrow and Gosling (2006) have also provided us with a prototype of what the lens for popular musical works might look like, taking into account the extent to which the music is fast, rhythmic, relaxing, loud, etc. But the question then is whether the left half of the lens model exists in a consistent way, such that music by this artist tends to have this specific feature consistently, and music by other artists—which does not contain this feature consistently—associates with a different underlying personality characteristic.

In Küfner et al.’s study of creative writing, the connection between the author’s personality traits and the measured cues was generally weaker than the connection between the observers’ perceptions of personality and those same cues. This is often the case in lens model studies of any kind.

Thus, the idea that an accurate judgment of an artist can be derived solely from engagement with her art supposes consistency in both work and person. I was struck by another musician’s commentary on his life and work recently:

“You know, even when I’m touring there’s some sort of character [I’m playing],” he says later, near the end of a 40-minute conversation. “The music and Twitter is definitely another character, a self-deprecating character. I’m self-deprecating Ryley. But the real Ryley should be smoking a [expletive] carton of Pall Mall Reds while getting government stipends. That’s the real Ryley. The [expletive] character Ryley lucked it out and [expletive] gets to play gigs, have beer, and get free hummus backstage on a rider.” —Ryley Walker

So perhaps it’s a blind alley, and our art is neither consistent nor reflective of the artist, but given the considerable interest in the topic from artists and non-artists (such as myself) alike, I would enjoy hearing about the pursuit of empirical support for the idea.

Then again, maybe it’s best if I’m allowed to insist I know what it’s like to be a friend of Tom Waits.

Let me have this, science.