The New and Improved Geography of Personality - Now Includes Canada!

A little while ago, I looked at a study on the geography of personality by Peter J. Rentfrow, Samuel D. Gosling and Jeff Potter. That work looked at the geographic distribution among the 50 states of the prevalence of the "big five" personality traits: extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousnness, and openness. Well, Richard Florida has maps that present similar data; except that these ignore state boundaries, which gives a clearer and more fine-grained sense of the actual distribution of those traits; and better yet, these maps include Canada. So here are the maps of the geography of personality for the US and Canada. (Note: Florida cites, as the source for these maps, Jason Rentfrow and Kevin Stolarick, and the data represented in these maps seem to show some slightly different patterns than the other paper, which I'll refer to as the Rentfrow et al. paper, even though both of these, technically, are Rentfrow et al. papers (do you think Peter and Jason are related?).)



According to Rentfrow, et al., extroversion is generally associated with "sociability, energy, and health," and extroverted people tend to socialize more, but also tend to be more indiscriminate in their associations; they don't necessarily have more close friends. The big hubs for extroversion seem to be centered around Chicago, Atlanta, and Florida, with Bos-Ny-Wash and California being the least extroverted regions. Canada is more uniform, though Ontarians seem to be a bit more extroverted than Albertans.



Agreeableness "reflects warmth, compassion, cooperativeness, and friendliness." Rentfrow et al. found that high levels of agreeableness in states correlated with social involvement and religiosity. It was also positively correlated with spending time with friends and having guests over, but negatively with going to bars and joining clubs. Again, Atlanta seems to be a major hub of agreeableness, and it is generally prevalent throughout the South; and again Bos-Ny-Wash and Southern California score low. Greater Toronto and Alberta score slightly lower as well, and Vancouver scores slightly higher.



Neuroticism is characterized by "anxiety, stress, impulsivity, and emotional instability and is related to antisocial behavior, poor coping, and poor health." Unsurprisingly, the Rentfrow et al. study found that highly neurotic states had lower rates of exercise, higher rates of disease, and a shorter life expectancy. In these states, people are less likely to join clubs and spend time with friends. Again, the Northeast represents one of the ends of the spectrum for the distribution of this trait; but in this case it's focused very particularly around the New York City area. There's a secondary neurotic hub around Ohio; the South and West are generally un-neurotic, as is Canada - esepecially Vancouver.



Conscientiousness at the individual level "reflects dutifulness, responsibility, and self-discipline [and] it is positively associated with religiosity" and health-promoting behavior. The South has high levels of conscientiousness; the Northeast, not so much. Southern Ontario and the big cities of California also seem to have lower levels of conscientiousness.



Openness "reflects curiosity, intellect, and creativity at the individual level." Rentfrow et al. found that highly open states had high levels of liberal values, and a disproportionate number of people in the "artistic and investigative professions". People in these areas are more tolerant of homosexuality, more likely to support legalization of marijuana, and more likely to be pro-choice. However, more open states tend to have lower rates of social involvement. and are considerably less religious. "Open" people are concentrated around New York City and the cities of the West Coast from Vancouver to San Diego. The South, Midwest, and southern Ontario are less open.

Taking these maps as a whole, what's most remarkable to me is the extent to which the story of the geography of personality in North America is a story about the difference between New York City and Atlanta. Just look at those maps: in the case of every one of the big five personality traits, both of those cities represent one end of the spectrum of the distribution of that trait; and in every case, they represent opposite ends of that spectrum. In other words, both areas are outliers for every trait, and both areas are outliers in opposite directions for every trait. Other parts of North America, like Canada and the interior West, are either generally near the middle of the spectrum for most traits; or, like the Midwest, they share patterns with the Atlanta-centered South or the NYC-centered Northeast depending on the trait. But in every single case, Atlanta and New York City are diametrically opposed to each other. It's fascinating.

The Geography of Personality

A fascinating study (pdf link) by Peter J. Rentfrow, Samuel D. Gosling, and Jeff Potter looks at the geographical variation of "the big five" personality traits: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. From the abstract:

Volumes of research show that people in different geographic regions differ psychologically. Most of that work converges on the conclusion that there are geographic differences in personality and values, but little attention has been paid to developing an integrative account of how those differences emerge, persist, and become expressed at the geographic level... We present a theoretical account of the mechanisms through which geographic variation in psychological characteristics emerge and persist within regions... Results provided preliminary support for the model, revealing clear patterns of regional variation across the U.S. and strong relationships between state-level personality and geographic indicators of crime, social capital, religiosity, political values, employment, and health.

So by looking at the distribution of personality traits, we may be able to discover something about broad social factors like health, crime, and economic development. The authors place their work in the context of the long history in anthropology of describing personality differences among nations, but their work is focused on regions within the United States. The paper includes five maps of their results, clsasifying states by quintile, and I can't resist posting all five of them. The first shows extraversion:



Extraversion is generally associated, as the authors say, with "sociability, energy, and health." And the study found that states with higher levels of extraversion tended to be the states with higher levels of social involvement, such as participating in clubs and hanging out at bars. (They note, though, that it didn't correlate with the amount of time spent with friends; thus, "individuals appear to spend more time socializing in states where E is high than they do in low-E states, but their socializing is apparently somewhat indiscriminate and is not restricted to close friends.") You can clearly see the most extraverted states are in the Upper Midwest and northern Plains and parts of the South - and, a bit to my surprise, in the mid-Atlantic region. (And does anyone have a good explanation for Maine?) Another interesting note: state-level extraversion is positively correlated with robbery and murder rates.



Agreeableness "reflects warmth, compassion, cooperativeness, and friendliness." The authors found that high levels of agreeableness in states correlated with social involvement and religiosity. It was also positively correlated with spending time with friends and having guests over, but negatively with going to bars and joining clubs. Highly agreeable states also had fewer deaths from cancer and heart disease. Among the researchers' unpredicted findings was that these states also have a disproportionate number of artists and entertainers (which is a bit surprising just looking at the map).




Conscientiousness at the individual level "reflects dutifulness, responsibility, and self-discipline [and] it is positively associated with religiosity" and health-promoting behavior. The study found that conscientiousness had a positive correlation with religiosity at the state level and a slight correlation with the amount of exercise people did. Conscientiousness was also negatively correlated with going to bars and, for some reason, with frequency of having guests over. You can see that high-conscientiousness states tend to cluster in the Plains, the Southwest, and parts of the Southeast; the northeast is very unconscientious, evidently.



Neuroticism is characterized by "anxiety, stress, impulsivity, and emotional instability and is related to antisocial behavior, poor coping, and poor health." Unsurprisingly, the study found that highly neurotic states had lower rates of exercise, higher rates of disease, and a shorter life expectancy. In these states, people are less likely to join clubs and spend time with friends. The geographic clustering of neuroticism is strong: it's prevalent in the Northeast and much of Appalachia, and, for some reason, in the states of the lower Mississippi Valley. The West is decidedly less neurotic than the East, you may be unsurprised to hear.



Openness "reflects curiosity, intellect, and creativity at the individual level." The researchers predicted that highly open states would have high levels of liberal values, and a disproportionate number of people in the "artistic and investigative professions," and that is indeed what they found. People in these states are more tolerant of homosexuality, more likely to support legalization of marijuana, and more likely to be pro-choice. However, more open states tend to have lower rates of social involvement. and are considerably less religious. These states cluster on the West Coast and in the Bos-ny-wash megaregion, with a more scattered distribution elsewhere.

But why do these regional differences exist in the first place? The paper proposes a number of possible reasons, including selective migration (e.g., an open personality type moves from their dull Kentucky town to a "creative capital" like New York City or the Bay Area); social influence (a certain personality trait becomes more predominant in a given region simply be re-inforcing itself through repeated exposure to individuals, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of reinforcement); and environmental influence (people in cold, dreary climates like the Pacific Northwest or New England might be more prone to depression, or less aggressive).

It's fascinating stuff, and there's lots more in the (rather long) paper. The topic could be the subject of just about endless study and debate. And a natural next step would be to extend this study across countries - wouldn't maps like this of Europe or Asia be fascinating?