Researchers have compiled a "personality map" of the United States, which paints a picture of the country's population by highlighting where people of certain dispositions tend to live.
More creative people live on the East and West coasts, while folks in the South and the Midwest tend to be more friendly and conventional. Mid-Atlantic dwellers and New Englanders were shown be to more temperamental and uninhibited, according to the study, which is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study's authors say that Americans with similar temperaments are so likely to live in the same areas that a map of the country can easily be divided into regions with distinct personalities.
"This analysis challenges the standard methods of dividing up the country on the basis of economic factors, voting patterns, cultural stereotypes or geography that appear to have become ingrained in the way people think about the United States," said lead author Peter Rentfrow of the University of Cambridge. "At the same time, it reinforces some of the traditional beliefs that some areas of the country are friendlier than others, while some are more creative."
By utilizing a variety of data sources, including online surveys and Facebook, Rentfrow and his colleges assessed the personalities of more than 1.5 million people by administering questions about participants' psychological traits and demographics.
When it comes to personality traits, the so-called Big Five are the most measured: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
By assessing the Big Five in the survey participants, the researchers identified three distinct psychological profiles among the group. Data were collected over 12 years in five samples, with a nationally representative sampling taken from the 48 contiguous states and the District of Colombia.
By plotting the demographic data of the those belonging to each of the three profiles, the researchers found that certain regions were dominated by a certain psychological profile.
Rentfrow said the personality profiles can be linked a region's politics, economy and social attitudes.
"The study found that people in the friendly and conventional regions are typically less affluent, less educated, more politically conservative, more likely to be Protestant and less healthy compared to people in the other regions," Rentfrow and his colleagues wrote in a statement. "The relaxed and creative states' residents are more culturally and ethnically diverse, more liberal, wealthier, more educated, comparatively healthy and less likely to be Protestant than those living in other regions. The temperamental and uninhibited region has a larger proportion of women and older adults who are more affluent, politically liberal and unlikely to be Protestant."
As for why the results indicate what they do, Rentfrow explained that people's tendency to migrate is a key factor in a region's psychological makeup. People who are agreeable, friendly and conventional tend to be people who have never moved from their hometown, he said, whereas many people on the coasts moved there from somewhere else and have a sort of "frontier mentality" that lends itself well to creative work.