largely comprised of music education majors. One possible exception is the
study by Wubbenhorst (1994), who found roughly equal proportions of in-
troverts and extraverts among education majors and performance majors
based on scores from the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI; Myers &
McCauley, 1985). However, Kemp (1996), using the same measure, reported
a ratio of nearly two introverts for every one extravert in a sample of 210 per-
formance majors.
As suggested in the discussion of personality and chess, one must also con-
sider the possibility that the experience of the musical skill acquisition process
shapes a musician’s personality as much as his or her personality shapes the
experience. In the case of introversion, Kemp (1981a) was careful to point out
that years of exposure to solitary activity may evoke a tendency to with-
drawal from social situations, and other researchers have suggested that soli-
tary practice may serve a protective function among children subjected to ad-
verse domestic conditions or other social stresses (Ericsson & Faivre, 1988;
Howe, 1990). Likewise, high levels of emotional sensitivity or instability
among professional musicians are a predictable outcome of the intense pres-
sures and anxieties of a career in public performance (Cooper & Wills, 1989;
Hamilton et al., 1995). Similar explanations may also account for the ten-
dency to find the least consistency in personality profiles of novice music stu-
dents (Cutietta & McAllister, 1997; Freeman, 1974; Sample & Hotchkiss,
1971; Schleuter, 1972; Shuter-Dyson, 1977; Thayer, 1972; Wragg, 1974), and
increasingly distinctive profiles among samples engaged in advanced stages
of training and professional activity (see earlier studies).
Proponents of the innate talent perspective may counter that those who
possess the proper character prior to training are still more likely to make it
to the top of the heap and that the exaggerated personality profiles of adult
professional musicians relative to amateurs or young beginners reflect psy-
chological selection mechanisms that weed out individuals with incongruent
profiles. However, we can say with some degree of certainty that this is un-
likely for two reasons. First, the correlations between traditional personality
traits and tests or ratings of musical talent during childhood, adolescence,
and adulthood are either too small in magnitude or too unreliable in terms of
their direction or consistency across studies to be worthy of serious discus-
sion (Cooley, 1961; Freeman, 1974; Lehmann, 1951; Schleuter, 1972; Shuter-
Dyson, 1977; Thayer, 1972; Tunstall, 1982; Wragg, 1974). Second, a close ex-
amination of the data from those studies where selected personality traits
among musically trained or talented samples appear to be significantly differ-
ent from established norms reveals that the degree of variability within the
musical group is much more striking than the deviations of musicians from
the general population. Such variability further calls into question the valid-
ity of using personality measures to predict future participation or achieve-
ment in music.
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