Personality, Personality, Personality

The other day I spent a serendipitous 15 minutes with a European executive who had worked the last 18 months out of her company's NY headquarters. "You don't want to work there" she confided "people are really stressed and unpolite. Very tough. Horrible." Before crossing the Atlantic, she had worked for about 8 years with her company, most of them out of a European office located in a mid-sized provincial capital. She found the NY office to be a completely different organisation from what she had known her company to be.

A 2008 study by Rentfrow, Gosling and Potter published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science used data from 600,000 questionnaires to map the Big Five dimensions of personality (openness, concientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) across the U.S. What they found was quite enlightnening.

Look at the map below. The darker areas represent high preponderance of one of the big five (light areas, low preponderance of it). What would you guess this personality trait to be: openness, concientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness or neuroticism?

The answer, you have probably guessed, is neuroticism (all maps here). This map alone would explain why my acquaintance (quoted above) had such an experience in NY having come from a agreeable and anxiety-free European provincial capital. But it actually explains much more.

High-anxiety states (New York and New Jersey, but also states stressed by poverty, such as West Virginia and Mississippi) also tend to have higher rates of heart disease and lower life expectancy, Stephanie Simon explains: "Amiable states, like Minnesota, tend to be lower in crime. Dutiful states -- an eclectic bunch that includes New Mexico, North Carolina and Utah -- produce a disproportionate share of mathematicians. States that rank high in openness to new ideas are quite creative, as measured by per-capita patent production. But they're also high-crime and a bit aloof."

Maybe one day we will start considering some of these geographical patterns when setting up offices or even in guiding our recruitment strategies. We might even start looking to correlate personality and performance in specific environments. It remains a controversial debate, but we will rely on those high in openness to give it a good go.

(Further reading: Dr Jason Rentfrow at the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology in Cambridge debates here whether the origin of these patterns is selective migration, social influence or environmental influence)