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. 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
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
Oct. 22, 2013
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.
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
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.
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.
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
http://science.time.com/2013/10/22/the-united-states-of-attitude-an-interactive-guide-to-americas-moods/
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