America’s Mood Map: Geographical Psychology
“West Virginia is the most neurotic state, Utah is the most agreeable and the folks of Wisconsin are the country’s most extroverted, a new study says.”
Time recently published a an interactive guide to the “United States of Attitude” based on a recent publication by Dr. Peter Rentfrow, a professor in the department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge.
In Time’s article, an interactive map of the United States of America is offered, where you can run your mouse over any state and get a breakdown of the average temperament of the people in that state. A quiz is also offered asking some basic questions about your temperament to find the ideal state for you, emotionally. This quiz is an abbreviated version of the OCEAN test. And looks kinda like this:
1 = Strongly Disagree 7 = Strongly AgreeI see myself as …Extraverted, enthusiastic.1234567Critical, quarrelsome.1234567Dependable, self-disciplined.1234567Anxious, easily upset.1234567Open to new experiences, complex.1234567Reserved, quiet.1234567Sympathetic, warm.1234567Disorganized, careless.1234567Calm, emotionally stable.1234567Conventional, uncreative.1234567
The research described in this volume indicates that personality, political ideology, well-being, happiness, human virtues, and personal concerns are related to several important geographic social indicators.
“People who score high on these measures also have a high likelihood of migrating and settling into cosmopolitan areas,” says Rentfrow. Regions that score lower on openness and higher on the friendly and conventional scale, by contrast, have the lowest rates of emigration. “If you’re traditional and friendly and value family life, what’s the point of moving away?” Rentfrow asks.
That simple idea might be the best message we can take from the study. We’re less a nation of warring tribes and angry camps than we are a loud, boisterous, messy mix of geography, social history and the unpredictable X factors of human personality, all trying to make a go of things under the same national flag. In other words, we’re exactly what the Founding Fathers intended us to be.
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