Personality And Geography

Gene Expression:

Jason pointed me to this Guardian piece, US personalities vary by region, say researchers. It's pretty thin on the details, but luckily the original paper can be found online in full, A Theory of the Emergence, Persistence, and Expression of Geographic Variation in Psychological Characteristics. I haven't read the whole thing, nor do I know much about personality, so I have put the maps which illustrate regional variation in traits below the fold. But I do want to note the correlations between Openness and the following metrics on the state level:

% Arts and entertainment = 0.23
% Computer and mathematical = 0.24
Patent production per capita = 0.28

* Controlling for income, race, sex, college degree, and proportion of state population living in city with one million or more residents. p <>

Below are maps from the post. Richard Florida had a similar post on this some time ago.

Wikipedia has a good summary of the Big Five personality traits. Read more about the Big Five personality taxonomy here. [PDF] Take the online test to find out your personality type.











(HT Tyler Cowen via Arnold Kling)