Submission + - Personality Types Cluster Geographically
Hugh Pickens writes: "Drawing on a database of hundreds of thousands of individual personality surveys, psychologists have mapped the distribution of personality types across the United States and interestingly, America's psychogeography lines up reasonably well with its economic geography. Greater Chicago is a center for extroverts and also a leading center for sales professionals. The Midwest has a prevalence of conscientious types who work well in a structured, rule-driven environment. The South, and particularly the I-75 corridor, where so much Japanese and German car manufacturing is located, is dominated by agreeable and conscientious types who are both dutiful and work well in teams. Regions like Silicon Valley or the high-tech Route 128 corridor around Boston are home to concentrations of open-to-experience types who are drawn to creative endeavor, innovation, and entrepreneurial start-up companies. One potential explanation is that people migrate to places where their psychological needs are easily met or perhaps a process of selective migration drains the agreeable and conscientious regions of the most driven, most creative, and most mobile — only reinforcing their psychogeographic profiles, while magnifying the innovative edge in places where open-to-experience types concentrate."
