An online friend of mine from Sweden -- and isn't it grand that this medium allows us to form relationships with people in far flung places that we might never otherwise meet? -- and I have been talking about the relative typology of his country and my part of the country and joking that Sweden and New England have in common an introverted preference. I was just guessing, based on my experience of living here most of my life, but as it turns out, it seems I am right, at least according to Richard Florida's column in yesterday's Boston Globe --
"But what accounts for such psychogeographical clustering? One potential explanation is that people migrate to places where their psychological needs are easily met: Open people choose to live in places with hustle and bustle to satisfy that craving for new experiences, while conscientious people settle in places where the atmosphere is ordered to meet their need for predictability.
Or perhaps, personality is influenced by our surroundings. More emotionally stable people who live in places where neurotic types form the majority may become irritable and stressed because the people around them are getting to them...
Our research suggests another possibility as well: the link between personality and the willingness to move. Conscientious and agreeable types in particular are less likely to move. Once they find a place, they tend to spread out gradually over time. Extroverts, on the other hand, are much more likely to move over greater distances. Open-to-experience types are drawn to thrills and risk, and moving, after all, is one of life's biggest new experiences.
This fuels a process of selective migration whereby agreeable and conscientious regions are drained 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."
So my observation to my friend that New England feels quite introverted fits this research. With all the caveats about typing a region or a country in mind, it seems to me that New England is generally a place of "if you don't bother me, I wont bother you" attitudes, the more so the further north you go. People here are cordial and welcoming to tourists and newcomers, provided they do not think they will be taken in as the equivalent to long lost family.
When I first moved to Maine more than 35 years ago, I met a woman who had lived in my small town for more than 70 years. Naively I said, "So you must be a native then."
"Oh no ,dear," she gently corrected me, "I'm from away. I was born in New Hampshire."
Not for us the expansiveness of the South or the West. We mark our land and our lives with our stone walls and live happily together savoring our tradition and lack of excitement. Our humor is dry -- listen to any of these samples to see what I mean.
"Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. And each of these dimensions has been found to affect key life outcomes from life expectancy and divorce to political ideology, job choices and performance, and innovation and creativity."
Wikipedia tells us of these 5 dimensions, derived from The IPIP-NEO (International Personality Item Pool Representation of the NEO PI-R™):
"The Big Five factors and their constituent traits can be summarized as follows:
Openness - appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience.
Conscientiousness - a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behaviour.
Extraversion - energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation and the company of others.
Agreeableness - a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
Neuroticism - a tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability; sometimes called emotional instability."
A short form of the test is available here.
Psychologists really can't resist typological measures. Something in us seems to want to look again and again at clusters of trait and attitudes that will allow us to characterize large groups of people. Wikipedia offers an overview of some of them here.
You can view the maps of our psychogeography here.