St. Louis County, Minnesota, is the most “extroverted” place in the US, and its opposite, Gwinnett County in southern Georgia, is the most “introverted,” new research has found.
The new Florida Atlantic University study set out to see if communities across the country have different personalities by mapping large amounts of data from a Harvard-based personality test to each of the counties tested across the United States.
County by county, the researchers discovered many unexpected facts: Brazos County, Texas, is the “most neurotic,” for example.
But they also confirmed some stereotypes: Manhattan, according to the study, scored both the least “conscientious” and the least “pleasant.”
The research also found that the benefits of this “personality polarization” were decidedly mixed—benefits that this team of psychologists and data scientists measured in terms of reported outcomes for health, education, and overall well-being.
County by county across the United States, disparate enclaves with dominant personality traits are emerging, according to a new study. But the findings were conflicting about the benefits.
In fact, people who scored high on “conscientiousness” tended to have better educational outcomes when they lived in a county full of people who were much less conscientious, or even downright rude, at least according to their analysis.
“To the extent that communities are diverse, people can ‘adapt’ in multiple ways,” according to the psychologist and lead author of the study. Dr. Kevin Lanning.
“One way to grasp this idea,” said Dr. Lanning, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, “is to describe both people and communities in terms of types.”
Lanning and his colleagues at the University of Oregon and the University of Toronto focused on five traits for which national data were available, and the opposite for each trait.
Those traits were: openness vs. closed-mindedness, neuroticism vs. stability, conscientiousness vs. laziness, extraversion vs. introversion, and agreeableness vs. unpleasantness.
Two more scales were also tracked, measuring a person’s degree of “honesty and humility,” as well as an individual’s place on the conservative to liberal continuum.
Growing political polarization has, for years, been well known for altering the landscape of the United States, with Americans gravitating toward places that best suit their own views.
Their study, published in January in the journal Current research in ecological and social psychologyused data from Harvard Synthetic Openness Personality Assessment Project (SAPA).
Each of these seven total scales was tested in comparison to how being surrounded by similar personality types or “person-community fit” benefited individuals in terms of education, health, and well-being.
Of those 21 total comparison tests, there were 13 cases in which a person’s match (or clash) with the dominant local personality trait seemed to “significantly” affect their well-being, health, or educational level.
“Although these effects,” the researchers note, “were typically small.”
People who scored high on both “Honesty-Humility” and “Conscientiousness” appeared to have greater well-being when surrounded by equally agreeable people, but, paradoxically, they scored lower on both educational advancement and healthy behavior.
The opposite was true for “openness,” where open people reported worse well-being when surrounded by equally talkative people, despite appearing healthier and better educated.
Manhattan had the highest proportion of “open” people, but perhaps, unsurprisingly, the lowest percentage of “nice” or “conscientious” people.
Among counties with more than 500 respondents in Harvard’s SAPA data set, Bexar County, San Antonio, had the highest percentage of “nice” people.
“Just as the ethnic character of a community can be described by proportions of different ethnic groups,” Lanning said, “the psychological character of a community can perhaps be better understood by a set of proportions of psychological types.”
But the psychologist cautioned that limited data from counties with smaller populations may have skewed some of his team’s research.
“It’s important to note that when comparing different counties, small counties are inevitably more likely to appear at the extremes,” Dr. Lanning said.
Two of the smallest counties in the US, Yamhill Oregon and Santa Barbara, California, showed spectacular results during these 21 comparative analyses, but the authors noted that “the results for these smaller counties would likely reflect greater volatility of the ratios due to sample size.
Among counties with more than 500 respondents in Harvard’s SAPA data set, Bexar County, San Antonio, had the highest percentage of “nice” people.
Manhattan had the highest proportion of “open” people, but perhaps, unsurprisingly, the lowest percentage of “nice” or “conscientious” people.
In fact, the percentage of open-minded people in Manhattan was found to be almost twice that of Detroit, although Detroiters were twice as likely as Manhattanites to be classified as conscientious.
citizens of both Palm Beach and Broward counties in Florida, according to the new study, had roughly equal proportions of open-minded and conscientious people.
While these larger data sets made predictions for these counties more likely to be accurate, Dr. Lanning cautioned against making too many generalizations about their neighbors.
“Comparisons between individual counties should be made with caution,” he said.