American Regions Have Different Personalities: Friendly to Uninhibited

What's your personality type? It may all depend on where you live. Scientists have discovered that Americans with similar temperaments are so likely to live in the same areas that a map of the country can be divided into regions with distinct personalities.

In order to examine how personalities differ across the country, the researchers analyzed the personality traits for more than 1.5 million people.  Participants answered questions about their psychological traits and demographics, including their state of residents. The researchers then identified three psychological profiles based on five broad dimensions of personality--openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. They then overlaid their findings on a national map and found that certain psychological profiles were predominant in three distinct geographic areas.

So what did they find? It turns out that people in the north-central Great Plains and the South tend to be conventional and friendly. Those in the Western and Eastern seaboards lean toward being mostly relaxed and creative. New Englanders and Mid-Atlantic residents, though, are prone to being more temperamental and more uninhibited.

"These national clusters of personalities also relate to a region's politics, economy, social attitudes and health," said Peter Rentfrow, one of the researchers, in a news release.

In fact, the findings reveal that people in the friendly and conventional regions are typically less affluent, less educated and more politically conservative. They're also more likely to be Protestant and less healthy compared to the people in other regions. The relaxed and creative states tended to be more culturally and ethnically diverse, more liberal, wealthier, more educated, comparatively healthy and less likely to be Protestant. Those in regions that were temperamental and uninhibited were more likely to be women and older adults who were affluent, politically liberal and unlikely to be Protestant.

"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 Rentfrow in a news release. "At the same time, it reinforces some of the traditional believes that some areas of the country are friendlier than others, while some more are creative."

So what shaped the region's personalities? It's possible that it has everything to do with migration and social influence. Research has shown that agreeableness is a trait often found in people who stay in their hometowns, and analysis showed that a large proportion of residents in the friendly and conventional region lived in the same state the year before. The relaxed and creative region may have been influenced by a frontier mentality that endures with lots of people moving to the region while the temperamental and uninhibited region may have been influenced by the fact that significant numbers of people have moved away.

The findings are published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.