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What Your Taste In Music Says About You: Peer Group Influence
As for you...
- You now speak fluent English with an accent indistinguishable from the accent of your native-born American posse in Dodge. You also dress like them, swagger around like them, ride horses like them, and have habits and tastes and religious interests like theirs.
- You walk and talk and identify with your Dodge peer group—not your parents and the Korean world they still inhabit.
- In short, you inhabit a personal environment of your own, an environment that overlaps with the personal environments of your peer group. It shows. What your taste in music says about you is that you still have the genetic inheritance of your parents, of course, but the specific cultural information you have acquired has come mainly from your peer group. And that includes not just your language, but also your musical tastes.
How much of is music innate, and how much is culturally acquired? Probably something like half and half. But you can’t disentangle genetically inherited influence from culturally acquired influence because musical universals show up in varying degrees in the music of all cultures.