People have a need to express themselves and to be unique from others. However, this need might conflict with other goals, such as the need to belong and fit in with others. Recent research and polling suggest that people may be more reluctant to express themselves and stand out than in previous years, but few studies have examined such societal trends in a systematic way. We examined changes in need for uniqueness among 1,339,160 Internet respondents (M_age = 21.09, SD = 9.69; 65.8% women) from 2000 and 2020. Across the 20-year period, participants who completed the survey more recently reported a lower need for uniqueness, particularly in terms of not wanting to defend their beliefs in public forums and caring more about what others think about them. Results are discussed in the context of possible causes of changes in uniqueness desires and the possible societal implications.

Do people of different socioeconomic status (SES) differ in how they see themselves on the Big Two self-concept dimensions of agency and communion? Existent research relevant to this theoretically and socially important question has generally been indirect: It has relied on distant proxies for agentic and communal self-concepts, narrow operationalizations of SES, comparatively small samples, and data from few nations/world regions. By contrast, the present research directly examines the associations between SES and agentic and communal self-concepts, relies on well-validated measures of agency and communion, examines three complementary measures of SES, and uses data from 6 million people (years of age: M = 26.12, SD = 11.50) across 133 nations. Overall, people of higher status saw themselves as somewhat more agentic and as slightly less (or negligibly less) communal. Crucially, those associations varied considerably across nations. We sought to explain that variation with 11 national characteristics and found only three of them to be robustly relevant: National religiosity and pathogen load curbed status differences in agentic self-concepts, and income inequality amplified status differences in communal self-concepts. Our discussion develops theory to explain the importance of national religiosity, pathogen load, and income inequality for socioeconomic status differences in agentic and communal self-concepts and it also describes the substantial societal implications of those differences.

Personality traits cluster across countries, regions, cities, and neighborhoods. What drives the formation of these clusters? Ecological theory suggests that physical locations shape humans' patterns of behaviors and psychological characteristics. Based on this theory, we examined whether and how differential land-cover relates to individual personality. We followed a preregistered three-pronged analysis approach to investigate the associations between personality and land-cover across the United States. Urban areas were positively associated with openness to experience and negatively associated with conscientiousness. Coastal areas were positively associated with openness and neuroticism but negatively associated with agreeableness and conscientiousness.

Corruption is often seen as one of the root causes of pressing national and global challenges. The persisting stark national differences in corruption levels and their potential causes have thus attracted growing interest from international business scholars. The objective of this study was to re-examine key factors that predict levels of national corruption. Drawing on comprehensive personality data from over 5 million respondents across 87 nations, and numerous dimensions of national culture, the study examines the relative importance of national personality versus national culture and wealth as predictors of national corruption. Regression analysis found that collectivism (particularly societal practices pertaining to collectivism) and wealth were robust predictors of corruption. In contrast, there was no consistent support for the effects of the Big Five personality traits aggregated to the national level, above and beyond the effects of national culture and wealth. These findings highlight and specify the important role played by national culture, and call into question previous research on national personality and corruption. More broadly, our study further highlights the need to exert caution when examining the influence of national-level personality, and the need for cross-national personality researchers to improve the validity, interpretability, and replicability of their work.

To assess how early-life exposure to air pollution affects adult personality, we use new annual lead (Pb) vehicle emissions data by county, for 1969 to 1981, and 'Big Five' personality data for 130,000 adults. Models with county and cohort fixed effects show higher Pb exposure during the first five years of life lowers agreeableness and increases openness. Weaker evidence suggests Pb lowers conscientiousness and increases neuroticism but it has no effect on extraversion. We also assess how regulation-induced cuts in total suspended particulates (TSP) levels affect adult personality. We are unable to disentangle early life effects of Pb and TSP.

Knowledge spillovers across economic agents are central to the process of technological innovation. Yet, the mechanisms by which spillovers travel and manifest as innovation are poorly understood. To fill that gap, we study how knowledge spillovers emanating from other cities (knowledge pools) diffuse and get absorbed. We refine the notion of connectedness by comparing three mechanisms through which knowledge spillovers occur between cities (geographically, technologically, and socially via social media links). We also examine how local psychological openness facilitates this diffusion and absorption process. Using 360 U.S. cities as our empirical context, we find geographically mediated and socially mediated (but not technologically mediated) knowledge spillovers to show positive relationships with the rate of patenting. Moreover, results confirm a positive moderation effect of psychological openness on the relationship between socially mediated knowledge spillovers and the rate of patenting. By providing a more comprehensive test of knowledge spillover mechanisms, our study indicates that the often-quoted physical proximity to knowledge pools remains a robust driver. However, a city’s virtual connection to knowledge pools (e.g., via social media links between people) also matter, particularly if that city is psychologically more open. This catalyst of local openness might occur because open populations better absorb inflowing knowledge and utilize it more effectively via key innovators. We discuss implications for research and policy with a particular focus on virtual human (vs. geographically bounded) connectedness and psychological openness as intertwined key areas of a new human geography of innovation.

In general, people are influenced by the standards set forth by groups of others; however, the levels of such conformity vary between people and across cultures. Here, we investigated factors related to country-level personality profile conformity (i.e., person-culture personality fit) across ~5.9 million participants, residing in 57 different countries. We examined how each of the Big Five personality traits and cultural tightness are associated with variation in person-culture personality fit. We found that scoring higher in Extraversion, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and residing in a tight cultural context explains increased personality profile conformity, while scoring higher in Openness and Neuroticism and residing in a loose cultural context explains lower personality profile conformity. Furthermore, we found that Openness and Extraversion interact with cultural context to predict levels of personality profile conformity. These findings reveal that both dispositional and cultural factors correspond to the tendency to conform to country level norms.

The early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed stark regional variation in the spread of the virus. While previous research has highlighted the impact of regional differences in sociodemographic and economic factors, we argue that regional differences in social and compliance behaviors—the very behaviors through which the virus is transmitted—are critical drivers of the spread of COVID-19, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic. Combining self-reported personality data that capture individual differences in these behaviors (3.5 million people) with COVID-19 prevalence and mortality rates as well as behavioral mobility observations (29 million people) in the United States and Germany, we show that regional personality differences can help explain the early transmission of COVID-19; this is true even after controlling for a wide array of important sociodemographic, economic, and pandemic-related factors. We use specification curve analyses to test the effects of regional personality in a robust and unbiased way. The results indicate that in the early stages of COVID-19, Openness to experience acted as a risk factor, while Neuroticism acted as a protective factor. The findings also highlight the complexity of the pandemic by showing that the effects of regional personality can differ (a) across countries (Extraversion), (b) over time (Openness), and (c) from those previously observed at the individual level (Agreeableness and Conscientiousness). Taken together, our findings support the importance of regional personality differences in the early spread of COVID-19, but they also caution against oversimplified answers to phenomena as complex as a global pandemic.

There is growing evidence that psychological characteristics are spatially clustered across geographic regions and that regionally aggregated psychological characteristics are related to important outcomes. However, much of the evidence comes from research that relied on methods that are theoretically ill-suited for working with spatial data. The validity and generalizability of this work are thus unclear. Here we address two main challenges of working with spatial data (i.e., modifiable areal unit problem and spatial dependencies) and evaluate data-analysis techniques designed to tackle those challenges. To illustrate these issues, we investigate the robustness of regional Big Five personality differences and their correlates within the United States (Study 1; N = 3,387,303) and Germany (Study 2; N = 110,029). Our results suggest that regional psychological differences are robust and can reliably be studied across countries and spatial levels. The results also show that ignoring the methodological challenges of spatial data can have serious consequences for research concerned with regional psychological differences.

Since Trump was elected U.S. President in 2016, researchers have sought to explain his support, focusing on structural factors (e.g., economics) and psychological factors (e.g., negative emotions). This study integrates these perspectives in a regional analysis of 18+ structural variables, revealing that regions with high neuroticism and economic deprivation were more likely to vote for Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections. These regions also had higher levels of implicit racial bias and lower ethnic diversity.

Breakthrough innovations are expected to have a bigger impact on local economies than incremental innovations do. Yet past research has largely neglected the regional drivers of breakthrough innovations. Building on theories that highlight the role of personality psychology and human agency in shaping regional innovation cultures, we focus on psychological openness as a potential explanation for why some regions produce more breakthrough innovations than others do. We use a large data set of psychological personality profiles (∼1.26M individuals) to estimate the openness of people in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the US. Our results reveal that psychological openness is strongly associated with the emergence of breakthrough innovations but not with the emergence of incremental innovations. The findings remained robust after controlling for an extensive set of predictors of regional innovation such as star inventors, star scientists, or knowledge diversity. The results held even when we used tolerance as an alternative indicator of openness. Taken together, our results provide robust evidence that openness is relevant for regional innovation performance, serving as an important predictor for breakthrough innovations but not for incremental innovations.

Are there universal patterns in musical preferences? To address this question, we built on theory and research in personality, cultural, and music psychology to map the terrain of preferences for Western music using data from 356,649 people across six continents. In Study 1 (N = 284,935), participants in 53 countries completed a genre favorability measure, and in Study 2 (N = 71,714), participants in 36 countries completed an audio-based measure of preferential reactions to music. Both studies included self-report measures of the Big Five personality traits and demographics. Results converged to show that individual differences in preferences for Western music can be organized in terms of five latent factors that are invariant (i.e., universal) across countries and that generalize across assessment methods. Furthermore, the patterns of correlations between personality traits and musical preferences were largely consistent across countries and assessment methods. For example, trait Extraversion was correlated with stronger reactions to Contemporary musical styles (which feature rhythmic, upbeat, and electronic attributes), whereas trait Openness was correlated with stronger reactions to Sophisticated musical styles (which feature complex and cerebral attributes often heard in improvisational and instrumental music). The patterns of correlations between musical preferences and gender differences, ethnicity, and other sociodemographic metrics were also largely invariant across countries. Together, these findings strongly suggest that there are universal patterns in preferences for Western music, providing a foundation on which to develop and test hypotheses about the interactions between music, psychology, biology, and culture.

We study the origins of entrepreneurship (culture) in the United States. For the analysis, we make use of a quasi-natural experiment – the gold rush in the second part of the 19th century. We argue that the presence of gold attracted individuals with entrepreneurial personality traits. Due to a genetic founder effect and the formation of an entrepreneurship culture, we expect gold rush counties to have higher entrepreneurship rates. The analysis shows that gold rush counties indeed have higher entrepreneurship rates from 1910, when records began, until the present as well as a higher prevalence of entrepreneurial traits in the populace.

How relevant are the Big Five in predicting religiosity? Existing evidence suggests that the Big Five domains account for only a small amount of variance in religiosity. Some researchers have claimed that the Big Five domains are too broad and not sufficiently specific to explain much religiosity variance. Accordingly, they speculated that the more specific Big Five facets should predict religiosity better. Yet, such research has generally been sparse, monocultural, descriptive, process-inattentive, and somewhat contradictory in its results. Therefore, we conducted three large-scale, cross-cultural, theory-driven, and process-attentive studies. Study 1 (N = 2,277,240) used self-reports across 96 countries, Study 2 (N = 555,235) used informant-reports across 57 countries, and Study 3 (N = 1,413,982) used self-reports across 2,176 cities, 279 states, and 29 countries. Our results were highly consistent across studies. Contrary to widespread assumptions, the Big Five facets did not explain substantially more variance in religiosity than the Big Five domains. Moreover, culture was much more important than previously assumed. More specifically, the Big Five facets collectively explained little variance in religiosity in the least religious cultural contexts (4.2%) but explained substantial variance in religiosity in the most religious cultural contexts (19.5%). In conclusion, the Big Five facets are major predictors of religiosity, but only in religious cultural contexts.

Levels of fertility and the shape of the age-specific fertility schedule vary substantially across U.S. regions with some states having peak fertility relatively early and others relatively late. Structural institutions or economic factors partly explain these heterogeneous patterns, but regional differences in personality might also contribute to regional differences in fertility. Here, we evaluated whether variation in extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience measured at the U.S. state-level was associated with the level, timing, and context of fertility across states above and beyond sociodemographics, voting behavior, and religiosity. Generally, states with higher levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness had more traditional fertility patterns, and states with higher levels of neuroticism and openness had more nontraditional fertility patterns, even after controlling for established correlates of fertility (r ~|.50|). Personality is an overlooked correlate that can be leveraged to understand the existence and persistence of fertility differentials.

Accumulating evidence suggests that culture changes in response to shifting socioecological conditions; economic development is a particularly potent driver of such change. Previous research has shown that economic development can induce slow but steady cultural changes within large cultural entities (e.g., countries). Here we propose that economically driven culture change can occur rapidly, particularly in smaller cultural entities (e.g., cities). Drawing on work in cultural dynamics, urban economics, and geographical psychology, we hypothesize that changes in local housing prices—reflecting changing availability of local amenities—can induce rapid shifts in local cultures of Openness. We propose two mechanisms that might underlie such cultural shifts: selective migration (i.e., people selectively moving to cities that offer certain amenities) and social acculturation (i.e., people adapting to changing amenities in their city). Based on trait Openness scores of 1,946,752 U.S. residents, we track annual changes in local Openness across 199 cities for nine years (2006–2014). We link these data to annual information on local housing markets, an established proxy for local amenities. To test interdependencies between the time series of local housing markets and Openness, we use Panel Vector Autoregression modeling. In line with our hypothesis, we find robust evidence that rising housing costs predict positive shifts in local Openness but not vice versa. Additional analyses leveraging participants’ duration of residence in their city suggest that both selective migration and social acculturation contribute to shifts in local Openness. Our study thus offers a new window onto the rapid changes of cultures at local levels.

Lower socioeconomic status (SES) harms psychological well-being, but this burden is greatest in developed nations. Drawing on large global datasets, the study shows that national religiosity can buffer the harmful effects of low SES, suggesting that as religiosity declines, these effects will worsen.

Childhood lead exposure has devastating lifelong consequences, as even low-level exposure stunts intelligence and leads to delinquent behavior. However, these consequences may be more extensive than previously thought because childhood lead exposure may adversely affect normal-range personality traits. Personality influences nearly every aspect of human functioning, from well-being to career earnings to longevity, so effects of lead exposure on personality would have far-reaching societal consequences. In a preregistered investigation, we tested this hypothesis by linking historic atmospheric lead data from 269 US counties and 37 European nations to personality questionnaire data from over 1.5 million people who grew up in these areas. Adjusting for age and socioeconomic status, US adults who grew up in counties with higher atmospheric lead levels had less adaptive personality profiles: they were less agreeable and conscientious and, among younger participants, more neurotic. Next, we utilized a natural experiment, the removal of leaded gasoline because of the 1970 Clean Air Act, to test whether lead exposure caused these personality differences. Participants born after atmospheric lead levels began to decline in their county had more mature, psychologically healthy adult personalities (higher agreeableness and conscientiousness and lower neuroticism), but these findings were not discriminable from pure cohort effects. Finally, we replicated associations in Europeans. European participants who spent their childhood in areas with more atmospheric lead were less agreeable and more neurotic in adulthood. Our findings suggest that further reduction of lead exposure is a critical public health issue.

We explore how variation in fatal automobile crashes across small geographic areas is associated with geographic variation in self-rated psychological and behavioral characteristics. Specifically, estimates of ZIP-code-level automobile fatality rates were linked to a separate dataset comprising 2.8 million responses to a widely used self-report personality questionnaire. To control for an area's wealth and population density, associations were estimated at the slightly larger level of US Census ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs). Relationships were estimated using an intraclass adjustment method, where the estimated correlation between individual scores and ZCTA-level fatality rates was divided by the square root of the estimated within-ZCTA intraclass correlation. Further, the ZCTA-level correlation was estimated separately for each US state to examine the consistency of associations. Rates of fatal crash involvement tended to be higher in areas where respondents were more likely to describe themselves as being depressed, moody, and quarrelsome. Some relationships were less intuitive; for instance, rates of fatal crash involvement tended to be higher in areas where respondents described themselves as more helpful and as less easily distracted. However, many small-area-level associations between self-rated personality and fatality rates were found to be in the same direction across more states than expected by chance. This pattern indicates that even many of the less intuitive associations were often highly reliable and general, which has implications for identifying geographic areas with heightened automobile fatality risk.

Regional differences in personality are associated with a range of outcomes. This study examined how mountainous terrain correlates with regional variation in personality. Results showed that mountainous areas tend to have higher levels of openness but lower agreeableness, extraversion, and conscientiousness.

People benefit psychologically when their personality matches the prevailing characteristics of their culture, but not everyone experiences this benefit equally. This large-scale study reveals that personality traits like agreeableness and neuroticism amplify the benefits of a person-culture match, while traits like openness and extraversion can diminish them.

Can personality traits be measured and interpreted reliably across the world? While the use of Big Five personality measures is increasingly common across social sciences, their validity outside of western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations is unclear. Adopting a comprehensive psychometric approach to analyze 29 face-to-face surveys from 94,751 respondents in 23 low- and middle-income countries, we show that commonly used personality questions generally fail to measure the intended personality traits and show low validity. These findings contrast with the much higher validity of these measures attained in internet surveys of 198,356 self-selected respondents from the same countries. We discuss how systematic response patterns, enumerator interactions, and low education levels can collectively distort personality measures when assessed in large-scale surveys. Our results highlight the risk of misinterpreting Big Five survey data and provide a warning against naïve interpretations of personality traits without evidence of their validity.

The study and explanation of regional personality differences is a central research topic in geographical psychology. Such research on regional 'mentalities' can inform, for example, studies examining socioeconomic trajectories of regions and local populations. Whereas existing regional personality research mostly concentrated on regions in the United States and the United Kingdom, the present study delivers results for 97 German regions (Raumordnungsregionen). We analyze and aggregate individual-level data collected in the The Big Five Project study (N = 73,756). We compare regional differences in the Big Five traits between urban versus rural regions, East versus West Germany, and Northern versus Southern Germany. The results indicate that: (a) popular stereotypes (e.g., reserved Northerners, jovial Southerners, and open urbanites) may contain a kernel of truth; (b) systematic migration patterns could drive/maintain regional personality differences; and (c) there is a relatively clear Cologne–Munich line in the regional variation of neuroticism in Germany. Despite the small effect sizes, the present results have new implications for research and practice concerned with the socioeconomic trajectories of German regions.

Substantial and systematic cross-country variation in entrepreneurship rates has been found in various studies. We attempt to explain such differences focusing on the interaction between institutional factors and population psychological characteristics. Constitutional provisions supporting economic freedom is our measure of the institutional context, whereas we proxy psychological characteristics with a country’s endowment of agency culture. We apply an IV-GMM treatment to deal with endogeneity to a dataset comprising 86 countries over the period 2004-2013 and we control for de facto variables and other factors that are likely to influence entrepreneurship. Our results demonstrate that agency culture is indeed an important predictor of entrepreneurship and that this effect is moderated by constitutional provisions supporting economic freedom. In particular, the impact of agency culture on entrepreneurship becomes stronger as a country expands the constitutional protection of economic rights.

An extensive literature has emerged in regional studies linking organization-based measures of entrepreneurship (e.g., self-employment, new start-ups) to regional economic performance. A limitation of the extant literature is that the measurement of entrepreneurship is not able to incorporate broader conceptual views, such as behaviour, of what actually constitutes entrepreneurship. This paper fills this gap by linking the underlying and also more fundamental and encompassing entrepreneurship culture of regions to regional economic performance. The empirical evidence suggests that those regions exhibiting higher levels of entrepreneurship culture tend to have higher employment growth. Robustness checks using causal methods confirm this finding.

Two recent electoral results - Donald Trump’s election as US president and the UK’s Brexit vote - have re-ignited debate on the psychological factors underlying voting behavior. Both campaigns promoted themes of fear, lost pride, and loss aversion, which are relevant to the personality dimension of Neuroticism, a construct previously not associated with voting behavior. To that end, we investigate whether regional prevalence of neurotic personality traits (Neuroticism, Anxiety, Depression) predicted voting behavior in the US (N = 3,167,041) and the UK (N = 417,217), comparing these effects with previous models, which have emphasized the roles of Openness and Conscientiousness. Neurotic traits positively predicted share of Brexit and Trump votes and Trump gains from Romney. Many of these effects persisted in additional robustness tests controlling for regional industrial heritage, political attitude, and socio-economic features, particularly in the US. The 'sleeper effect' of neurotic traits may profoundly impact the geopolitical landscape.

Recent research has identified regional variation of personality traits within countries, but we know little about the underlying drivers of this variation. We propose that the Industrial Revolution, as a key era in the history of industrialized nations, has led to a persistent clustering of well-being outcomes and personality traits associated with psychological adversity via processes of selective migration and socialization. Analyzing data from England and Wales, we examine relationships between the historical employment share in large-scale coal-based industries (coal mining and steam-powered manufacturing industries that used this coal as fuel for their steam engines) and today’s regional variation in personality and well-being. Even after controlling for possible historical confounds (historical energy supply, education, wealth, geology, climate, population density), we find that the historical local dominance of large-scale coal-based industries predicts today’s markers of psychological adversity (lower Conscientiousness [and order facet scores], higher Neuroticism [and anxiety and depression facet scores], lower activity [an Extraversion facet], and lower life satisfaction and life expectancy). An instrumental variable analysis, using the historical location of coalfields, supports the causal assumption behind these effects (with the exception of life satisfaction). Further analyses focusing on mechanisms hint at the roles of selective migration and persisting economic hardship. Finally, a robustness check in the U.S. replicates the effect of the historical concentration of large-scale industries on today’s levels of psychological adversity. Taken together, the results show how today’s regional patterns of personality and well-being may have their roots in major societal changes underway decades or centuries earlier.

Recent research has found clear indications of regional differences in the personality traits of the population. Such regional differences may significantly contribute to explaining regional development. We provide an overview of regional differences in entrepreneurial personality traits among the population in Germany. There are a number of highly significant regional differences but the strength of the effects is relatively small. The empirical evidence suggests that the regional differences found are due to selective migration and also to socialization.

Considerable attention has been paid to America’s political and economic divides. These divides revolve around class and location, with more affluent, more educated and denser places leaning more open-minded and liberal and less affluent, less educated and less dense places leaning more conservative. We contend that such divides are also reflected and reinforced by preferences, attitudes and predispositions for culture. More specifically, we argue that Americans’ preferences for music will reflect dimensions of these political and economic divides. To test this proposition, our research examines the geographic variation of five key categories of music preferences across 95 of the largest US metropolitan areas. We use factor analysis to identify and map geographic variation of musical preferences, and we use both bivariate correlation analyses and regression analysis to examine the associations between metro-level musical preferences and key economic, demographic, political, and psychological variables. We find that musical preferences generally reflect and reinforce America’s broader economic and political divides.

Studies have shown that cognitive ability is correlated with parental socioeconomic status (pSES). However, little is known about the correlation between personality and pSES. To better understand this relation, we conducted a meta-analysis of the correlations between pSES and personality traits and temperament dimensions. The correlations were generally very small with the exception of the correlation between pSES and openness to experience. Our results were replicated in a large (N = 2,183,377) data set of self-reported personality scores collected online. Using this data set, we also examined the interaction between pSES and personality on attained education and socioeconomic status. We found evidence for the resource substitution hypothesis, which proposes that personality compensates for background disadvantage.

What are the entrepreneurial places in the USA? Although seminal theorizing on the determinants of entrepreneurship gives culture a unique and important role, systematic empirical evidence linking the distinct cultural identity of regions to their local entrepreneurial spirit and vitality is still scarce. This study offers a first, systematic overview on the nexus between regional cultural identity and latent and manifest entrepreneurship across the USA. To directly assess regional cultural identity, we apply the American Nations and Patchwork Community Types approaches and explore in which way these distinct spatially based cultural regions are reflected by significant differences in entrepreneurial activity and underlying biologically based propensities. We combine annual entrepreneurship rates at the county level with personality data collected in a large-scale, Internet-based study of 3,457,270 US residents. The findings suggest that entrepreneurship culture reflects the dynamic interplay between the region’s cultural identity and its latent and manifest entrepreneurship.

A widespread stereotype holds that the Germans are notorious worriers, an idea captured by the term, German Angst. An analysis of country-level neurotic personality traits (Trait Anxiety, Trait Depression, and Trait Neuroticism; N = 7,210,276) across 109 countries provided mixed support for this idea; Germany ranked 20th, 31st, and 53rd for Depression, Anxiety, and Neuroticism respectively suggesting, at best, the national stereotype is only partly valid. Theories put forward to explain the stereotypical characterization of Germany focus on the collective traumatic events experienced by Germany during WWII, such as the massive strategic bombing of German cities. We thus examined the link between strategic bombing of 89 German cities and today’s regional levels in neurotic traits (N = 33,534) and related mental health problems. Contrary to the WWII-bombing hypothesis, we found negative effects of strategic bombing on regional Trait Depression and mental health problems. This finding was robust when controlling for a host of economic factors and social structure. We also found Resilience X Stressor interactions: Cities with more severe bombings show more resilience today: lower levels of neurotic traits and mental health problems in the face of a current major stressor – economic hardship.

Human personality traits differ across geographical regions. However, it remains unclear what generates these geographical personality differences. Because humans constantly experience and react to ambient temperature, we propose that temperature is a crucial environmental factor that is associated with individuals’ habitual behavioural patterns and, therefore, with fundamental dimensions of personality. To test the relationship between ambient temperature and personality, we conducted two large-scale studies in two geographically large yet culturally distinct countries: China and the United States. Using data from 59 Chinese cities (N = 5,587), multilevel analyses and machine learning analyses revealed that compared with individuals who grew up in regions with less clement temperatures, individuals who grew up in regions with more clement temperatures (that is, closer to 22 °C) scored higher on personality factors related to socialization and stability (agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability) and personal growth and plasticity (extraversion and openness to experience). These relationships between temperature clemency and personality factors were replicated in a larger dataset of 12,499 ZIP-code level locations in the United States (N = 1,660,638). Taken together, our findings provide a perspective on how and why personalities vary across geographical regions beyond past theories (subsistence style theory, selective migration theory and pathogen prevalence theory). As climate change continues across the world, we may also observe concomitant changes in human personality.

Are religious people psychologically better or worse adjusted than their non-religious counterparts? Hundreds of studies have reported a positive relation between religiosity and psychological adjustment. Recently, however, a comparatively small number of cross-cultural studies has questioned this staple of religiosity research. The latter studies find that religious adjustment benefits are restricted to religious cultures. Gebauer, Sedikides, and Neberich (2012b) suggested the religiosity-as-social-value hypothesis (RASV) as one explanation for those cross-cultural differences. RASV states that, in religious cultures, religiosity possesses much social value, and, as such, religious people will feel particularly good about themselves. In secular cultures, however, religiosity possesses limited social value, and, as such, religious people will feel less good about themselves, if at all. Yet, previous evidence has been inconclusive regarding RASV and regarding cross-cultural differences in religious adjustment benefits more generally. To clarify matters, we conducted three replication studies. We examined the relation between religiosity and self-esteem (the most direct and appropriate adjustment indicator, according to RASV) in a self-report study across 65 countries (N = 2,195,301), an informant-report study across 36 countries (N = 560,264), and another self-report study across 1,932 urban areas from 243 federal states in 18 countries (N = 1,188,536). Moreover, we scrutinized our results against seven, previously untested, alternative explanations. Our results fully and firmly replicated and extended prior evidence for cross-cultural differences in religious adjustment benefits. These cross-cultural differences were best explained by the RASV hypothesis.

Research and theorizing on gender and age differences in self-esteem have played a prominent role in psychology over the past 20 years. However, virtually all empirical research has been undertaken in the United States or other Western industrialized countries, providing a narrow empirical base from which to draw conclusions and develop theory. To broaden the empirical base, the present research uses a large Internet sample (N = 985,937) to provide the first large-scale systematic cross-cultural examination of gender and age differences in self-esteem. Across 48 nations, and consistent with previous research, we found age-related increases in self-esteem from late adolescence to middle adulthood and significant gender gaps, with males consistently reporting higher self-esteem than females. Despite these broad cross-cultural similarities, the cultures differed significantly in the magnitude of gender, age, and Gender × Age effects on self-esteem. These differences were associated with cultural differences in socioeconomic, sociodemographic, gender-equality, and cultural value indicators. Discussion focuses on the theoretical implications of cross-cultural research on self-esteem.

The Pearson product–moment correlation coefficient (r_p) and the Spearman rank correlation coefficient (r_s) are widely used in psychological research. We compare r_p and r_s on 3 criteria: variability, bias with respect to the population value, and robustness to an outlier. Using simulations across low (N = 5) to high (N = 1,000) sample sizes we show that, for normally distributed variables, r_p and r_s have similar expected values but r_s is more variable, especially when the correlation is strong. However, when the variables have high kurtosis, r_p is more variable than r_s. Next, we conducted a sampling study of a psychometric dataset featuring symmetrically distributed data with light tails, and of 2 Likert-type survey datasets, 1 with light-tailed and the other with heavy-tailed distributions. Consistent with the simulations, r_p had lower variability than r_s in the psychometric dataset. In the survey datasets with heavy-tailed variables in particular, r_s had lower variability than r_p, and often corresponded more accurately to the population Pearson correlation coefficient (R_p) than r_p did. The simulations and the sampling studies showed that variability in terms of standard deviations can be reduced by about 20% by choosing r_s instead of r_p. In comparison, increasing the sample size by a factor of 2 results in a 41% reduction of the standard deviations of r_s and r_p. In conclusion, r_p is suitable for light-tailed distributions, whereas r_s is preferable when variables feature heavy-tailed distributions or when outliers are present, as is often the case in psychological research.

Do macropsychological factors predict 'hard' economic outcomes like regional economic resilience? Prior approaches focused on economic infrastructure, but psychological traits like emotional stability and entrepreneurship also matter. This study examined how regional psychological traits predicted economic recovery from the Great Recession of 2008–2009 in the United States and Great Britain.

A growing body of research demonstrates that older individuals tend to score differently on personality measures than younger adults. However, recent research using item response theory (IRT) has questioned these findings, suggesting that apparent age differences in personality traits merely reflect artifacts of the response process rather than true differences in the latent constructs. Conversely, other studies have found the opposite—age differences appear to be true differences rather than response artifacts. Given these contradictory findings, the goal of the present study was to examine the measurement equivalence of personality ratings drawn from large groups of young and middle‐aged adults (a) to examine whether age differences in personality traits could be completely explained by measurement nonequivalence and (b) to illustrate the comparability of IRT and confirmatory factor analysis approaches to testing equivalence in this context. Self‐ratings of personality traits were analyzed in two groups of Internet respondents aged 20 and 50 (n = 15,726 in each age group). Measurement nonequivalence across these groups was negligible. The effect sizes of the mean differences due to nonequivalence ranged from –.16 to .15. Results indicate that personality trait differences across age groups reflect actual differences rather than merely response artifacts.

Does it matter if your personality fits in with the personalities of the people where you live? The present study explored the links between person-city personality fit and self-esteem. Using data from 543,934 residents of 860 U.S. cities, we examined the extent to which the fit between individuals’ Big Five personality traits and the Big Five traits of the city where they live (i.e., the prevalent traits of the city’s inhabitants) predicts individuals’ self-esteem. To provide a benchmark for these effects, we also estimated the degree to which the fit between person and city religiosity predicts individuals’ self-esteem. The results provided a nuanced picture of the effects of person-city personality fit on self-esteem: We found significant but small effects of fit on self-esteem only for openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, rather than effects for all Big Five traits. Similar results and effect sizes were observed for religiosity. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance and limitations of this study.

What is the function of self-esteem? We classified relevant theoretical work into 3 perspectives. The cultural norm-fulfillment perspective regards self-esteem as a result of adherence to cultural norms. The interpersonal-belonging perspective regards self-esteem as a sociometer of interpersonal belonging. The getting-ahead perspective regards self-esteem as a sociometer of getting ahead in the social world, while regarding low anxiety/neuroticism as a sociometer of getting along with others. The 3 perspectives make contrasting predictions on the relation between the Big Five personality traits and self-esteem across cultures. We tested these predictions in a self-report study (2,718,838 participants from 106 countries) and an informant-report study (837,655 informants from 64 countries). We obtained some evidence for cultural norm fulfillment, but the effect size was small. Hence, this perspective does not satisfactorily account for self-esteem’s function. We found a strong relation between Extraversion and higher self-esteem, but no such relation between Agreeableness and self-esteem. These 2 traits are pillars of interpersonal belonging. Hence, the results do not fit the interpersonal-belonging perspective either. However, the results closely fit the getting-ahead perspective. The relation between Extraversion and higher self-esteem is consistent with this perspective, because Extraversion is the Big Five driver for getting ahead in the social world. The relation between Agreeableness and lower neuroticism is also consistent with this perspective, because Agreeableness is the Big Five driver for getting along with others.

In recent years, modern economies have shifted away from being based on physical capital and towards being based on new knowledge (e.g., new ideas and inventions). Consequently, contemporary economic theorizing and key public policies have been based on the assumption that resources for generating knowledge (e.g., education, diversity of industries) are essential for regional economic vitality. However, policy makers and scholars have discovered that, contrary to expectations, the mere presence of, and investments in, new knowledge does not guarantee a high level of regional economic performance (e.g., high entrepreneurship rates). To date, this knowledge paradox has resisted resolution. We take an interdisciplinary perspective to offer a new explanation, hypothesizing that hidden regional culture differences serve as a crucial factor that is missing from conventional economic analyses and public policy strategies. Focusing on entrepreneurial activity, we hypothesize that the statistical relation between knowledge resources and entrepreneurial vitality (i.e., high entrepreneurship rates) in a region will depend on hidden regional differences in entrepreneurial culture. To capture such hidden regional differences, we derive measures of entrepreneurship-prone culture from two large personality datasets from the United States (N = 935,858) and Great Britain (N = 417,217). In both countries, the findings were consistent with the knowledge-culture-interaction hypothesis. A series of nine additional robustness checks underscored the robustness of these results. Naturally, these purely correlational findings cannot provide direct evidence for causal processes, but the results nonetheless yield a remarkably consistent and robust picture in the two countries. In doing so, the findings raise the idea of regional culture serving as a new causal candidate, potentially driving the knowledge paradox; such an explanation would be consistent with research on the psychological characteristics of entrepreneurs.

A sociocultural motives perspective (SMP) on Big Five relationships is introduced. According to the SMP, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness elicit assimilation to sociocultural norms, Openness elicits contrast from these norms, and Extraversion and Neuroticism are independent of sociocultural assimilation and contrast. Due to sociocultural assimilation, then, relationships of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness with an outcome wax (become more positive or less negative) with that outcome's increasing sociocultural normativeness. Due to sociocultural contrast, relationships of Openness with an outcome wane (become less positive or more negative) with that outcome's increasing sociocultural normativeness. We tested the SMP using religiosity as our outcome. Study 1 included 4 cross-sectional self-report data sets across 66 countries (N = 1,129,334), 50 U.S. states (N = 1,057,342), 15 German federal states (N = 20,885), and 121 British urban areas (N = 386,315). Study 2 utilized informant-report data across 37 countries (N = 544,512). Study 3 used longitudinal data across 15 German federal states (N = 14,858). Results consistently supported the SMP. Relationships of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness with religiosity were more positive in religious sociocultural contexts than in secular contexts. Relationships of Openness with religiosity were more negative in religious sociocultural contexts than in secular contexts. At a more general level, the SMP offers theory-driven explanations for cross-cultural variations in Big Five relationships with their outcomes.

In his commentary, Terracciano (2014) argues that we failed to present evidence supporting the hypothesis that cultural variation in personality development stems, in part, from age-graded life transitions in early adulthood (Bleidorn et al., 2013). His argument rests on four points, which we outline in the following sections.

The economic recession of 2008-2009 is widely regarded as the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. This study focuses on regional resilience factors that may have offered some protection from the slowdown in economic activity during this crisis. Drawing from the entrepreneurial-culture approach and psychological research suggesting a personality-based measure of entrepreneurial culture, we examine whether a prevalent regional entrepreneurial culture predicts a smaller decline in regional startup rates during the crisis, above and beyond the effect of economic resilience factors.

There is overwhelming evidence for regional variation across the United States on a range of key political, economic, social, and health indicators. However, a substantial body of research suggests that activities in each of these domains are typically influenced by psychological variables, raising the possibility that psychological forces might be the mediating or causal factors responsible for regional variation in the key indicators. Thus, the present article examined whether configurations of psychological variables, in this case personality traits, can usefully be used to segment the country. Do regions emerge that can be defined in terms of their characteristic personality profiles? How are those regions distributed geographically? And are they associated with particular patterns of key political, economic, social, and health indicators? Results from cluster analyses of 5 independent samples totaling over 1.5 million individuals identified 3 robust psychological profiles: Friendly & Conventional, Relaxed & Creative, and Temperamental & Uninhibited. The psychological profiles were found to cluster geographically and displayed unique patterns of associations with key geographical indicators. The findings demonstrate the value of a geographical perspective in unpacking the connections between microlevel processes and consequential macrolevel outcomes.

Are there developmental trends in how individuals experience and engage with music? Data from two large cross-sectional studies involving more than a quarter of a million individuals were used to investigate age differences in musical attitudes and preferences from adolescence through middle age. Study 1 investigated age trends in musical engagement. Results indicated that (a) the degree of importance attributed to music declines with age but that adults still consider music important, (b) young people listen to music significantly more often than do middle-aged adults, and (c) young people listen to music in a wide variety of contexts, whereas adults listen to music primarily in private contexts. Study 2 examined age trends in musical preferences. Results indicated that (a) musical preferences can be conceptualized in terms of a five-dimensional age-invariant model, (b) certain music-preference dimensions decrease with age (e.g., Intense, Contemporary), whereas preferences for other music dimensions increase with age (e.g., Unpretentious, Sophisticated), and (c) age trends in musical preferences are closely associated with personality. Normative age trends in musical preferences corresponded with developmental changes in psychosocial development, personality, and auditory perception. Overall, the findings suggest that musical preferences are subject to a variety of developmental influences throughout the life span.

During early adulthood, individuals from different cultures across the world tend to become more agreeable, more conscientious, and less neurotic. Two leading theories offer different explanations for these pervasive age trends: Five-factor theory proposes that personality maturation is largely determined by genetic factors, whereas social-investment theory proposes that personality maturation in early adulthood is largely the result of normative life transitions to adult roles. In the research reported here, we conducted the first systematic cross-cultural test of these theories using data from a large Internet-based sample of young adults from 62 nations (N = 884,328). We found strong evidence for universal personality maturation from early to middle adulthood, yet there were significant cultural differences in age effects on personality traits. Consistent with social-investment theory, results showed that cultures with an earlier onset of adult-role responsibilities were marked by earlier personality maturation.

In recent years the topic of entrepreneurship has become a major focus in the social sciences, with renewed interest in the links between personality and entrepreneurship. Taking a socioecological perspective to psychology, which emphasizes the role of social habitats and their interactions with mind and behavior, we investigated regional variation in and correlates of an entrepreneurship-prone Big Five profile. Specifically, we analyzed personality data collected from over half a million U.S. residents as well as public archival data on state-level entrepreneurial activity. Results revealed that an entrepreneurship-prone personality profile is regionally clustered. This geographical distribution corresponds to the pattern that can be observed when mapping entrepreneurial activity across the United States and was replicated in independent German and British samples.

Hypotheses about mean-level age differences in the Big Five personality domains, as well as 10 more specific facet traits within those domains, were tested in a very large cross-sectional sample (N = 1,267,218) of children, adolescents, and adults (ages 10-65) assessed over the World Wide Web. The results supported several conclusions. First, late childhood and adolescence were key periods. Across these years, age trends for some traits (a) were especially pronounced, (b) were in a direction different from the corresponding adult trends, or (c) first indicated the presence of gender differences. Second, there were some negative trends in psychosocial maturity from late childhood into adolescence, whereas adult trends were overwhelmingly in the direction of greater maturity and adjustment. Third, the related but distinguishable facet traits within each broad Big Five domain often showed distinct age trends, highlighting the importance of facet-level research for understanding life span age differences in personality.

Richard Wilkinson's "inequality hypothesis" describes the relationship between societal income inequality and population health in terms of the corrosive psychosocial effects of social hierarchy. An explicit component of this hypothesis is that inequality should lead individuals to become more competitive and self-focused, less friendly and altruistic. Together these traits are a close conceptual match to the opposing poles of the Big Five personality factor of Agreeableness; a widely used concept in the field of personality psychology. Based on this fact, we predicted that individuals living in more economically unequal U.S. states should be lower in Agreeableness than those living in more equal states. This hypothesis was tested in both ecological and multilevel analyses in the 50 states plus Washington DC, using a large Internet sample (N = 674,885). Consistent with predictions, ecological and multilevel models both showed a negative relationship between state level inequality and Agreeableness. These relationships were not explained by differences in average income, overall state socio-demographic composition or individual socio-demographic characteristics.

Alleged personality differences between individuals who self-identify as "dog people" and "cat people" have long been the topic of wide-spread speculation and sporadic research. Yet existing studies offer a rather conflicting picture of what personality differences, if any, exist between the two types of person. Here we build on previous research to examine differences in the Big Five personality dimensions between dog people and cat people. Using a publicly accessible website, 4,565 participants completed the Big Five Inventory and self-identified as a dog person, cat person, both, or neither. Results suggest that dog people are higher on Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, but lower on Neuroticism and Openness than are cat people. These differences remain significant even when controlling for sex differences in pet-ownership rates. Discussion focuses on the possible sources of personality differences between dog people and cat people and identifies key questions for future research.

Can the Internet reach beyond the U. S. college samples predominant in social science research? A sample of 564,502 participants completed a personality questionnaire online. We found that 19% were not from advanced economies; 20% were from non-Western societies; 35% of the Western-society sample were not from the United States; and 66% of the U. S. sample were not in the 18-22 (college) age group.

Web-based studies have become increasingly common in the social sciences, but have been rare in genetic epidemiology in general and twin studies in particular. We here review the methods, validity checks and preliminary correlational data from an on-line questionnaire collected from 2005-2008. During this time period, 44,112 individuals completed the questionnaire. This sample was 65.3% female, 85.4% 18 years or older, 72.0% Caucasian and had a mean educational level of 12.2 years. The sample included 609 twin, 333 sibling and 201 parent-offspring pairs as well as 342 dating partners, 313 'significant other' pairs, 327 spouses and 2,316 friend pairs. A range of checks suggested low levels of invalid data. Correlations for personality, substance use and misuse, lifetime major depression, social attitudes, educational status, and height and weight were broadly similar to those obtained previously using conventional assessment methods. Web-based studies are a relatively easy and inexpensive way to ascertain large numbers of individuals, although obtaining twin pairs is more difficult, and female and monozygotic pairs are overrepresented. The sample is diverse and pair resemblance is generally similar to that obtained using interviews or mailed questionnaires.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether higher-order factors of the Big Five personality factors are artifacts of self-esteem. Results showed that the two higher-order factors, Stability and Plasticity, existed and were substantially correlated with self-esteem but remained intact when self-esteem was statistically controlled, indicating that they are not artifacts of self-esteem.

Political regionalism is commonly attributed to differences in historical settlement patterns, social class, and racial diversity. The present work provides evidence for the importance of another factor—state-level personality in understanding regional differences in political ideology. Drawing on research in personality and social psychology, we propose that geographical differences in voting patterns partially reflect differences in the psychological characteristics of individuals living in different states. Specifically, we examine associations between state-level personality scores and voting patterns in the 1996, 2000, and 2004 U.S. Presidential elections. Results show that mean levels of openness and conscientiousness within a state predict the percentage of votes for Democratic and Republican candidates. Furthermore, state-level personality scores account for unique variance in voting patterns, even after adjusting for standard sociodemographic and political predictors. This work demonstrates the value of investigating psychological variables at a regional level to better understand political culture and ideology.

Volumes of research show that people in different geographic regions differ psychologically. Most of that work converges on the conclusion that there are geographic differences in personality and values, but little attention has been paid to developing an integrative account of how those differences emerge, persist, and become expressed at the geographic level. Drawing from research in psychology and other social sciences, we present a theoretical account of the mechanisms through which geographic variation in psychological characteristics emerge and persist within regions, and we propose a model for conceptualizing the processes through which such characteristics become expressed in geographic social indicators. The proposed processes were examined in the context of theory and research on personality traits. Hypotheses derived from the model were tested using personality data from over half a million U.S. residents. Results provided preliminary support for the model, revealing clear patterns of regional variation across the U.S. and strong relationships between state-level personality and geographic indicators of crime, social capital, religiosity, political values, employment, and health. Overall, this work highlights the potential insights generated by including macrolevel perspectives within psychology and suggests new routes to bridging theory and research across several disciplines in the social sciences.

This article describes the translation and validation of the Dutch Big Five Inventory (BFI). The findings suggest that the Dutch BFI can be used across different age groups and showed similar demographic correlates as the English original. The brevity and reliability of the instrument make it appealing to researchers.

Although skeptics continue to doubt that most people are "ideological," evidence suggests that meaningful left-right differences do exist and that they may be rooted in basic personality dispositions, that is, relatively stable individual differences in psychological needs, motives, and orientations toward the world. Seventy-five years of theory and research on personality and political orientation has produced a long list of dispositions, traits, and behaviors. Applying a theory of ideology as motivated social cognition and a "Big Five" framework, we find that two traits, Openness to New Experiences and Conscientiousness, parsimoniously capture many of the ways in which individual differences underlying political orientation have been conceptualized. In three studies we investigate the relationship between personality and political orientation using multiple domains and measurement techniques, including: self-reported personality assessment; nonverbal behavior in the context of social interaction; and personal possessions and the characteristics of living and working spaces. We obtained consistent and converging evidence that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are robust, replicable, and behaviorally significant, especially with respect to social (vs. economic) dimensions of ideology. In general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized.

This study examined Big Five self-report data from individuals aged 10 to 20, focusing on developmental trends in personality reporting. The study found that personality reports became more coherent and differentiated with age. Acquiescence had a pronounced effect on psychometric characteristics in younger participants, while different Big Five traits showed distinct developmental patterns.

This paper investigates the nature of normality evaluations and how they relate to personality traits and well-being. Results showed that self-judgments of being normal were positively related to traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, and were negatively related to openness to experience. Normality evaluations were also linked to well-being and a sense of fitting in with peers.

Four studies examined and empirically documented Cultural Frame Switching (CFS; Hong, Chiu, & Kung, 1997) in the domain of personality. Specifically, we asked whether Spanish-English bilinguals show different personalities when using different languages? If so, are the two personalities consistent with cross-cultural differences in personality? To generate predictions about the specific cultural differences to expect, Study 1 documented personality differences between US and Mexican monolinguals. Studies 2-4 tested CFS in three samples of Spanish-English bilinguals, located in the US and Mexico. Findings replicated across all three studies, suggesting that language activates CFS for Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Further analyses suggested the findings were not due to anomalous items or translation effects. Results are discussed in terms of the interplay between culture and self.

The rapid growth of the Internet provides a wealth of new research opportunities for psychologists. Internet data collection methods, with a focus on self-report questionnaires from self-selected samples, are evaluated and compared with traditional paper-and-pencil methods. Six preconceptions about Internet samples and data quality are evaluated by comparing a new large Internet sample (N = 361,703) with a set of 510 published traditional samples. Internet samples are shown to be relatively diverse with respect to gender, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and age. Moreover, Internet findings generalize across presentation formats, are not adversely affected by nonserious or repeat responders, and are consistent with findings from traditional methods. It is concluded that Internet methods can contribute to many areas of psychology.

This study investigated how personality traits change in adulthood using data from over 132,000 participants. Results showed that traits such as conscientiousness and agreeableness increased throughout early and middle adulthood, while neuroticism declined among women but remained stable among men. These findings challenge the idea that personality traits are fixed by age 30.

This study examined age differences in self-esteem across the lifespan using data from over 326,000 participants. Results showed that self-esteem was high in childhood, dropped during adolescence, rose throughout adulthood, and declined in old age. These patterns held across gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and nationality.

This study examined the relationship between self-esteem and the Big Five personality traits in a large sample. High self-esteem was strongly related to emotional stability, extraversion, and conscientiousness, with smaller correlations for agreeableness and openness. The findings held across age, sex, social class, and ethnicity.