by Robin Landry

Created on: December 27, 2009   Last Updated: December 28, 2009

With half a dozen “corporate relocations” under my belt after a nearly twenty-five year insurance industry career, I would have to concur that where we live does impact us.  Whether the impact alters our core personality or simply influences behavior and attitude is not quite as clear, but there is no doubt that in life, as in real estate, “location can matter.”

Two separate 2008 articles from both Telegraph  examine this phenomenon in greater detail.  In the Newsweek article, writer Sharon Begley cites 1980s era research studies in which scientists looked at five attributes that were thought to influence personality:  extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to new ideas and experiences.  The Telegraph article delves a bit deeper into recent research conducted by Dr. Peter Jason Rentfrow of the University of Cambridge, England, in which Rentfrow and his team “mapped” how the five attributes are distributed throughout various geographic locations.

Rentfrow and his team developed the “map” by using results from 620,000 online surveys that they gathered over a period of six years.  Some of the results seem at best predictable if not downright stereotypical:  New Yorkers are more prone to anxiety and stress; stoic New Englanders rank low on the extraversion scale; agreeableness seems to be a bit more prevalent in the South. 

Other findings were a bit more surprising; for example, most of us would probably think of Hawaii as being a welcoming and hospitable place, but in the Cambridge study Hawaiians ranked low in openness and conscientiousness.  The District of Columbia ranked high in openness but low in agreeableness which might explain all of the increasingly strident tone of the political debates in Congress in recent months.  Most interesting, however were results for the people of Alaska.  The surveys showed that Alaskans were more likely to be introverted, disagreeable and not very open to new ideas but the least neurotic of all the other states (which tends to put former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in a whole new light).

Even more interesting are the researchers various theories about why these differences occur.  Some confirmed my own suspicions and personal experiences while others were a bit more surprising.   For example, I can recall finding the people of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a region which enjoys a relatively

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>