I am almost certain that the
answer is because most audiophiles score lower than average on what
psychologists define as trait agreeableness.
Agreeableness is the degree to
which your behaviour towards others is motivated by the desire to like and be liked
by other people. As a highly agreeable person, if you don't agree with someone
you are more likely to just smile and say something nice rather than pick a
fight with them.
Agreeableness correlates strongly
with an interest in people - so the majority of individuals who work in people
or care giving fields such as health care, hospitality, teaching etc, score
higher than the average for the population on trait agreeableness.
Lower levels of agreeability
correlate strongly with an interest in things - so the majority of people who
are engineers, mechanics, industrial designers, inventors etc score lower and
agreeableness than the average for the population.
Audiophiles tend to be the latter
and therefore don't tend to smile sweetly when they disagree with someone, they
tend to say what they think and say it with a sugar free coating!
As an additional insight, the
most disagreeable people in the world, say the bottom 4%, are close to 100% of
the prison population! They are also almost exclusively men whereas the top 5%
of the most agreeable people in the population are exclusively female.
Men and women differ on
agreeableness by about 1.5-2SD depending on which tool you use to make the
measurement. It is why the majority of audiophiles and most engineers are male
and the reverse is true for teaching, nursing, hospitality etc.
There are some very robust papers
that explore the idea of ‘Men with things, women with people’ if you care to
look for them.
