Despite many decades’ worth of investigations into associations between music and personality, the empirical findings are quite scant and scattered. Perhaps, this is because musicians are a diverse group of people, with far-reaching musical interests and wide-ranging personalities. Little research, however, has investigated whether musicians’ choice of musical genre bears a relationship to their personalities. In this study, we explore the limited literature on the relationship between music ensemble membership and personality by investigating personality differences between jazz and classical ensemble musicians on the Big Five personality dimensions. Musicians (N = 221) were recruited from college music ensembles, an introductory psychology course, a Facebook page, and Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants completed the Big Five Inventory (BFI), a validated self-report personality questionnaire, and analyses were conducted to compare the scores of jazz musicians to the scores of classical musicians. Significant differences emerged between jazz and classical musicians’ personalities, with gender playing a mediating role. These results may be beneficial for music educators and directors, as knowledge that specific personality traits predict music ensemble membership may help guide instruction techniques, communication, understanding between musicians of different musical genres, and general cooperation between music educators/directors and their ensembles.

尽管对音乐与个性之间的关联进行了数十年的研究，但实证结果却相当少且分散。也许，这是因为音乐家是一个多元化的群体，有着广泛的音乐兴趣和广泛的个性。然而，很少有研究调查音乐家对音乐流派的选择是否与他们的个性有关。在这项研究中，我们通过调查爵士乐和古典合奏音乐家在大五人格维度上的人格差异来探索关于音乐合奏成员与人格之间关系的有限文献。音乐家（N = 221）是从大学音乐合奏团、心理学入门课程、Facebook 页面和 Amazon Mechanical Turk 招募的。参与者完成了 Big Five Inventory (BFI)，这是一份经过验证的自我报告人格问卷，并进行了分析以比较爵士音乐家的分数与古典音乐家的分数。爵士乐和古典音乐家的个性之间出现了显着差异，其中性别起到了中介作用。这些结果可能对音乐教育者和导演有益，因为特定人格特征预测音乐合奏成员的知识可能有助于指导教学技巧、沟通、不同音乐流派的音乐家之间的理解，以及音乐教育者/导演与其合奏之间的一般合​​作。