BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
e w jackson (I am using fuchsia for the text color for this post just because he wouldn't like it), the Christian repiglican tea-bagger candidate for lt governor in Virginia is caught lying about statements he made about gays and gays in the US Military, probably because he is so far behind in the polls in next week's election (VOTE ON TUESDAY, 5 NOV 13). I wonder how he will explain these deliberate lies, these deliberate deceptions, to God? Check out this video.....
Oct 30, 2013
Rachel Maddow
reports on the GOP candidate for Virginia lt. governor, E.W. Jackson,
denying past statements about gays even though those statements are on
tape.
Interesting, click the link http://www.outofservice.com/bigfive/ and take the test (you can take a short version of the test by clicking the link on the map in the 2nd article) yourself to see what part of the country you relate to best. I did both, the short test told me I should be living in Georgia!!! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! From Mother Jones and Time......
The
"friendly and conventional"—in other words, conservative—region of the
United States. On political maps, you're used to seeing many of these
states colored red, not blue.American Psychological Association
Chances are you saw it. In fact, you may well have shared it. The Time.com version has been liked on Facebook 873,000 times as of this writing, with no signs of stopping.
I'm referring to a personality map of the United States, based on a just-published paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
by Peter J. Rentfrow and his colleagues. After administering a battery
of personality tests to more than a million and a half Americans across
the country, the study divides us up into three psychological regions:
The "friendly and conventional" South and Great Plains; the "relaxed and
creative" mountain states and West Coast; and the "temperamental and
uninhibited" East Coast and New England states. Here's the full image
from the study, one that you've probably seen already:
The three personality regions of the US American Psychological Association
But here's the thing: Many people sharing these maps probably didn't
realize the full implications of what they were looking at. These
images, after all, provide more than just stereotype-reaffirming
evidence that New Englanders are aloof and Southerners are friendly; and
more than just a fun game that lets you figure out what part of the
country you should be living in based on your personality (Time.com's version).
They also provide more evidence that political ideology, which varies
regionally in the US in a way that is closely related to these
temperamental regions, is, in substantial part, a psychological
phenomenon. In other words: Politics is personality.
The key personality test used to construct the maps above, after all, was a study of the "Big Five" personality traits:
Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and
Neuroticism. This is a widely accepted model of studying personality
(and no, it is not the same thing as Myers-Briggs).
For many years, scientists have known that some of the Big Five
dimensions are highly political. In particular, liberals tend to score
much higher on Openness (interest in novel experiences and ideas), while
conservatives score much higher on Conscientiousness (preference for
order, stability, and structure in your life).
The study, and the resulting maps, put an exclamation point on this
finding. After all, the "friendly and conventional" part of the US
scores quite low on Openness in the study—much lower than either of the
other two regions—even as it outscores both of the other two regions in
Conscientiousness. The "friendly and conventional" region was also the
only Republican-voting region of the three, and the most Protestant.
Granted, not every state with a "friendly and conventional"
personality voted Republican in the last election, and there are some
oddballs and outliers in other regions, too. But the overall trend is
clear. The residents of more liberal and more conservative states differ
in personality: In how open their residents are to new experiences, and
in how much they prize order and stability in their lives.
How do these personality dimensions drive ideology? Well, put simply,
people who are Open embrace change. Fixing healthcare with a big new
system and way of doing things? Bring it on. By contrast, people who are
low on Openness and high on Conscientiousness are interested in
stability and just not messing with it. Yes, that's right: The core of
the left-right divide, which turns on one's relative embrace of change
versus the status quo, is rooted in an individual's psychological
makeup. And personality traits, in turn, are substantially heritable and run in families.
So how did we end up so divided? On the individual level,
psychological differences between people have always been present, but
geography seems to be becoming ever more important as a factor. In
particular, the study by Rentfrow and colleagues suggest that people who
are high on Openness are naturally more daring and experimental, and
often all too eager to leave traditional parts of the country, where
they know they just don't belong, and relocate. Indeed, the Time.com version
of the map, which lets you take a personality test and then figure out
what state you belong in, in effect encourages precisely this sort of
psychological mobility.
In other words, there's a huge ideological sort going on, probably
much of it driven by Open people leaving to be closer to other Open
people—so they can all hang out at coffeehouses and complain about the
Tea Party—and more traditional people staying behind where they prize
family and community. And this, in turn, likely explains a substantial
part of the US's growing political polarization. Or as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt just put it on our newly launched Inquiring Minds podcast,
"For the first time in our history, the parties are not agglomerations
of financial or material interest groups, they're agglomerations of
personality styles and lifestyles. And this is really dangerous....If
it's now that 'You people on the other side, you're really different
from me, you live in a different way, you pray in a different way, you
eat different foods than I do,' it's much easier to hate those people.
And that's where we are."
Finally, it's important to note that the psychological news here is
not all good for liberals. Yeah, they're open-minded. But as the study
shows, a lot of them are also neurotic and not particularly agreeable.
Describing people in the "Temperamental and Uninhibited" region,
Rentfrow and colleagues use adjectives like "reserved, aloof, impulsive,
irritable, and inquisitive." Meanwhile, the emphasis on community,
warmth, and social capital in the "friendly and conventional" region is
hard not to admire.
The benefit of a psychological and personality-based approach to
political differences is thus twofold. Not only does it help us
understand why we're so polarized and divided; it also teaches us what
you can learn about how to live from the other side.
America’s Mood Map: An Interactive Guide to the United States of Attitude
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. Take TIME's test to find out which state
most suits you
For a country that features the word United so prominently
in its name, the U.S. is a pretty fractious place. We splinter along
fault lines of income, education, religion, race, hyphenated origin, age
and politics. Then too there’s temperament. We’re coarse or courtly,
traditionalist or rebel, amped up or laid-back. And it’s no secret that a
lot of that seems to be determined by — or at least associated with —
where we live.
Now a multinational team of researchers led by psychologist and
American expat Jason Rentfrow of the University of Cambridge in the U.K.
has sought to draw the regional lines more clearly, literally mapping
the American mood, with state-by-state ratings of personality and
temperament.
Which State Matches Your Personality?
Using
personality test data from over one million people, researchers have
identified three distinct personality regions in the country. Here, each
state is colored by the region it belongs to and shaded according to
how strongly its personality matches that profile.
Want to know
where you belong on this map? Click "Take the Test" and answer the
10-question survey to see which state most closely matches your
personality. Results are not recorded or reported to any third party.
According to the study, the winners (or losers, depending on how you
view these things) were in some cases surprising and in some not at all. The top scorers on extroversion were the ebullient folks of Wisconsin(picture the fans at a Packers game — even a losing Packers game). The lowest score went to the temperamentally snowbound folks of Vermont. Utah is the most agreeable place in the country and Washington, D.C., is the least (gridlock, anyone?).
For conscientiousness, South Carolina takes the
finishing-their-homework-on-time prize, while the independent-minded
Yanks of Maine — who prefer to do things their own way and in their own
time, thank you very much — come in last. West Virginia is the dark-horse winner as the country’s most neurotic state (maybe it was the divorce from Virginia in 1863). The least neurotic? Utah wins again.Washington, D.C., takes the prize for the most open place — even if their low agreeableness score means they have no idea what to do with all of the ideas they tolerate. North Dakotans, meantime, prefer things predictable and familiar, finishing last on openness.
The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
was an exhaustive one, spanning 13 years and including nearly 1.6
million survey respondents from the 48 contiguous states and the
District of Columbia. (Alaska and Hawaii were excluded because not
enough people responded to the researchers’ questionnaires.) The
subjects, recruited via websites and other means of advertising
throughout the academic community as well as through less rarefied
platforms like Facebook, were asked to take one of three different
personality surveys, though the most relevant one was what’s known as
the Big Five Inventory. (Take the full test here.)
As its name implies, the survey measures personality along five
different spectra, with the Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion,
Agreeableness and Neuroticism labels forming a handy acronym: OCEAN.
Each of those categories is defined by more-specific personality
descriptors, such as curiosity and a preference for novelty (openness);
self-discipline and dependability (conscientiousness); sociability and
gregariousness (extroversion); compassion and cooperativeness
(agreeableness); and anxiety and anger (neuroticism). The inventory gets
at the precise mix of those qualities in any one person by asking
subjects to respond on a 1-to-5 scale, from strongly disagree to
strongly agree, with 44 statements including, “I see myself as someone
who can be tense,” or “can be reserved,” or “has an active imagination,”
or “is talkative.” There turned out to be a whole lot of Americans
willing to sit still for that kind of in-depth prying, from a low of
3,166 in Wyoming (a huge sample group for a small state) to a high of
177,085 in California.
(MORE:Blame Game: Why We Hate to Feel Guilty)
When the returns were tallied, the country broke down into three
macro regions: New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, which the
researchers termed “temperamental and uninhibited”; the South and
Midwest, which were labeled “friendly and conventional”; and the West
Coast, Rocky Mountains and Sun Belt, described as “relaxed and
creative.” How they earned these labels was evident from the regions’
Big Five scores, with the temperamental and uninhibited states, for
example, blowing the doors off the rest of the country on the
neuroticism scale and the relaxed and creative ones similarly leading on
openness.
There is no shortage of historical and geographical explanations for
why the regions break down the way they do, but migration is the biggest
piece of the puzzle. Pioneers who moved West were, by definition,
people with open, curious, flexible temperaments, traits that become
part of the settled regions’ DNA and were passed down through the
generations. The researchers found a creative way to confirm this
theory, comparing the date the 48 surveyed states became part of the
union with their relaxed and creative profile. The result: the later a
state joined, the higher its score turned out to be. That very openness
and wanderlust stays with the native-born residents of these regions,
often impelling them to keep right on moving.
(MORE:Oz Revisited — Part 5: What’s the Matter With Kansas?)
“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.
An American by birth but a resident of the U.K., Rentfrow has an
innate familiarity with America’s regional differences, but also a
certain distance from the white-hot way they’ve grown worse of late. For
all the fretting we do over such factionalism, he’s not sure things are
as bad as they seem.
(MORE:Snake Salvation: One Way to Pray in Appalachia)
“Political values may exaggerate the temperamental differences and a
sense of tribalism may emerge,” he concedes, “but these things all come
from a mix of common personality types. The Northeast and the
Mid-Atlantic may be very different from the Rockies and the West, for
example, but openness is a big part of both personality profiles.”
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. MORE:As Temperature Rises, Empires Fall: How Heat Affects Human Behavior
