You truly believe that Kanye is the best musician on the planet. Is it simply a matter of taste, or is something else going on?

Although there's no doubt that music preferences change over time and are shaped by social factors like what our friends listen to and where we live, research has shown that our musical preferences is closely linked to our personality—from how conscientious to how neurotic we are.

But are there other psychological mechanisms at play? Surely there is an explanation that might explain why some songs have us scrambling to skip the next track while others trigger us to hit to the repeat button.

In a study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, a team of psychologists the University at Cambridge show that our thinking style plays a much bigger role than we had realized. Specifically, people with high levels of empathy typically have different preferences when it comes to music than those who are systemizers—that is, those who likes to analyze and understand the rules and patterns in the world.