The Personality of Place
New research linking locations to personality gives introverts fascinating data on where we’re most likely to feel at home.
Researchers have confirmed that places really do have a predominant personality. When you travel, it’s not your imagination if you sense that one city feels exuberant and outgoing while another spot gives off don’t-bother-me vibes.
The reasons for this phenomenon go deep. One factor is population density. A bustling city, for example, offers more inescapable social interactions than do sparsely settled forests, deserts, mountains or farmland. This shapes the habits, values and preferences of those who were born there and attracts incomers who appreciate the pace and tenor of the local lifestyle. Observers theorize that more natural landscapes induce a sense of calm that particularly appeals to introverts.
A second factor is a region’s economy. What industry dominates it? A tech-heavy area like Silicon Valley has an unusual number of engineers and others who skew introverted, while an entertainment capital like Nashville or Los Angeles might lean toward the extroverted end of the spectrum.
A third factor is culture and the particular history and values of peoples who settled in an area. Western states in the US have markedly different traditions than, say, old-Yankee parts of New England, the Scandinavian upper Midwest or French-influenced Louisiana. Even more variation occurs between countries. Local customs may guide how one greets strangers or how acceptable it is for an introvert to retreat for solitude.
Where do more introverts live?
Since I last wrote about the geography of personality in July 2022, two more data sets linking locations with different aspects of personality have emerged.
First, with its new Personality Atlas, the website Truity has organized its personality data on some 4 million individuals around the world according to its online users’ IP geolocation. You can use the interactive tool to explore the introversion/extroversion percentage of countries, many global cities and all US states. The Personality Atlas also gives you the same sort of data for four other personality dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and agreeableness.
Second, using a completely different type of methodology, the website Solitaire Bliss determined the most introverted states through data from the US Census Bureau’s American Time Use Survey. Going by which states’ residents most preferred to spend time alone versus which preferred to socialize, they ranked Vermont, New Hampshire and Montana as the most introverted states and South Dakota, Hawaii and Alabama as the most extroverted.
Limitations of the data
For people like me who love the countryside, all these tools unfortunately have limited applicability. At their best, they are city-centric, ignoring rural areas smaller than a state. They don’t give you the option of zeroing in on a region that is more rural than its state as a whole, such as Western Massachusetts, where I live in a town of 960 residents; upstate New York, which gets averaged in with densely packed New York City; or, say, Eastern Washington state. However, I ran across several other researchers, particularly some linked to real estate sales, who are currently compiling personality and lifestyle characteristics at the Zipcode level. Stay tuned for additional personality geography tools soon.
There may be some issues with data interpretation, too. Although all the data sets are quite large, each tool generates a significantly different list of “most introverted” and “most extroverted” cities, states and countries. For example, Truity’s Personality Atlas ranks Rhode Island as the third most extroverted state, while the University of Cambridge research referred to in my 2022 post put Rhode Island as the seventh most introverted state. In the Solitaire Bliss compendium, Rhode Island didn’t reach the top ten for either most extroverted or most introverted states, and ditto for the 16 Personalities rankings referred to in my previous post.
This type of inconsistency undoubtedly stems from different definitions for their personality categories. Truity’s Personality Atlas relies on the “Big Five” breakdown of personality characteristics, while the 16 Personalities data looks to the Myers-Briggs system of categories. Solitaire Bliss’ idiosyncratic framework doesn’t seem to line up well with either of those two schemas.
Maybe it’s best to take these maps, charts and tabulations just as a suggestive starting point for your own explorations as you travel or consider possible spots for relocation. Remember too that while you may wish to settle into a place that matches your comfort ideal, sometimes you may appreciate the jolt of visiting the opposite kind of environment – for just long enough to enjoy going home again.