People who listen to podcasts are more likely to be curious, more open to experience and less neurotic on average than non-listeners, a new study suggests.
Researchers surveyed 306 people from more than 10 countries on their podcast listening habits, comparing their listening habits with measures of personality.
They found that people who reported ever having listened to a podcast scored more highly for openness to experience, interest-based curiosity, and need for cognition – a measure reflecting an individual enjoyment of “effortful cognitive endeavours”.
Podcast listeners were also less likely to score highly for neuroticism, the tendency to experience negative emotions.
“That’s quite different from social media use,” said study co-author Dr Stephanie Tobin, a senior lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology. “There’s a positive association between neuroticism and using social media,” she said.
Of podcast listeners, those who scored more highly on the trait of agreeableness were more likely to report forming parasocial relationships with their favourite podcast hosts.
“Parasocial relationships were associated with listening for longer and listening to podcasts by known hosts,” the study’s authors found.
“The more you listen, the more you socially engage and feel like the favourite host is a friend,” Tobin said, adding that this association seemed to have positive outcomes.
“Feeling like the podcast host was your friend was related to feeling generally more connected with other people,” she said.
Previous research has shown that the method of podcast listening can affect “perceived intimacy”, finding that people felt more empathic and persuadable when hearing podcasts through headphones compared to through speakers.
The study participants ranged in age from 18 to 64, with average age of 27.9. Of the respondents, 78% reported being podcast listeners. The most popular podcast categories were comedy (48%), games and hobbies (34%), society and culture (23%), music (23%) and news and politics (23%).
Fewer than half of listeners engaged with podcast less than monthly, while 30% listened weekly and 12.5% were daily listeners.
Podcast listening was negatively correlated with the need to belong, which Tobin said was an unexpected finding.
“In the past, [the need to belong] has been related to some aspects of social media use and parasocial relationships with other kinds of media figures.” Previous research has found that people who score highly for the trait report more addictive social media habits.
The researchers emphasised that while certain personality traits were correlated with podcast listening, they could not establish causal links.
They did not study whether the frequency of listening or preference for podcast types were associated with different traits, or whether podcast listeners were also radio listeners. Another limitation of the study was that it relied on self-reports of listening habits.
Sabina Kleitman, an associate professor at the University of Sydney who was not involved in the study, said the research was well designed but said replication of the results and more detailed analysis – by podcast type, for example – was needed.
“The pattern of correlations also reveals that none of the personality variables shared any relationship with hours spent listening to podcasts,” she said.
The study was published in the journal Plos One.