I gave my last lecture of the year today. Well, last except for the test on Friday, but that’s not a “lecture” lecture. That’s personality psychology done for another 11 months. Western personality psychology is pretty much captured by the Big Five model of personality. An easy way to remember these is the acronym “Ocean” – for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. These are five “traits” that we each have to a greater or lesser extent. It’s the variations among the five that make us the (relatively) unique people that we are.
Which isn’t to say that we don’t share similarities with others. For example, 40-60% of the variation in these five traits is thought to be heritable. We get a large chunk of them from our parents. So our personalities tend to be quite similar to our parents’ because we share genes with them and because most of us grow up in households influenced by them.
But it’s probably not just the nurture of our familial environment, because those family environments are also nested in neighbourhoods, which are nested in suburbs, cities, etc. We’re more like our parents than our neighbours, but we’re more like our neighbours than people from the other side of the country.
For example, in Aotearoa, only openness to experience and honesty-humility vary significantly across the country. “Honesty-humility,” You say? Yes, yes, it’s part of the extended Big Five, called the Big Six or Hexaco model. Honesty-humility doesn’t come out in all studies around the world, but there are reasons to think it’s not irrelevant in our neck of the woods.
But now you want to know where the differences are. People living in larger centres, such as Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, tend to be more open than those in smaller or rural centres. Folk in the South Island and Palmerston North score higher on honesty-humility. At the same time, it’s important to note that these differences are statistically significant but practically negligible, though they may reflect some of our stereotypes.
Another approach is to not look at individual personality trait variation but try to identify patterns across personality, across regions.
I’ve not seen this done in New Zealand, but it has been done in the US in collaboration with one of my favourite contemporary personality researchers, Sam Gosling. Gosling wrote a fantastic popular psychology book about personality called Snoop.
Gosling has collected data about personality thanks to the ubiquity of the internet and the opportunity for web-based surveys. In a 2013 paper lead-authored by Peter Rentfrow with Gosling and other collaborators, data from more than half a million Americans was crunched to look for common combinations of the Big Five.
This identified three clusters of personality traits – a friendly and conventional profile characterised mainly by relatively high extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness; a relaxed and creative profile marked by low neuroticism and high openness; and a temperamental and uninhibited profile that was highest on neuroticism and lowest on conscientiousness.
And these vary across the US, not just state to state but in a kind of wave as you move from west to east coast. Yup, those Californian hippies are relaxed and creative and that fades as we head into the Midwest before cropping up again weakly in the east, giving way to friendly and conventional through the middle of the country, with temperamental/uninhibited folks from Ohio and up into the northeast. Yup, those New Yorkers …
Again, it’s important to remember that people tend to be more similar than they are different and these differences are very small.
Feel free to imagine where in New Zealand you think the most relaxed and creative types might live, or the more, ahem, emotional and impulsive …
