Written by Nea Lulik, MSc in Psychology of Individual Differences
On the 28th of October 2013, Markus Jokela-PhD., research psychologist from the University of Helsinki, held a talk at the University of Edinburgh about how geographical analysis could be used to predict differences in psychological characteristics. He used the data from the Greater London area to examine spatial patterns and personality traits. He also presented how socio-demographic neighbourhood characteristics influence people's life satisfaction. As an interesting addition, he included personality maps of Edinburgh.
The idea of connecting geography and personality came from looking at other disciplines such as economics or epidemiology. These fields of study always have some subdiscipline regarding demography or geography. So, a small group of psychologists wondered whether there is spatial psychology. There was some background to the idea that the geographical or spatial characteristics are somehow linked to psychological traits and individual differences.
Peter Jason Rentfrow describes in Geographical psychology: Exploring the interaction of environment and behaviour, how psychology and geographical perspectives interact in different ways. The aim of geographical psychology is to understand psychological characteristics, and individual differences in personality, from a spatial and geographical point of view, and to understand the mechanisms that are responsible for these psychological phenomena.
For example, are individual differences in personality or temperament related to people's residential mobility within the United States or Great Britain? Residential mobility represents a frequent change of residence, either in the same city, or between cities, states. Research regarding selective migration is usually related to socio-demographic capital, such as income, age, whether or not people have children. However, it fails to consider the psychological characteristics of individuals.
To some extent, it is obvious that psychological characteristics would influence people’s residential mobility. There is a common belief that extraversion increases the probability of moving. But on the other hand, the decision to move is determined by many factors, and is usually connected to their job, house and income. Extraversion by itself, is not a determinant of the decision to move to another place.
The findings that Dr. Jokela discussed were related to personality profiles and personality distributions within the range of the Greater London area. He observed systematic patterns in personality traits, and life satisfaction, across different areas.
Do personality traits across postal districts within London somehow relate to socio-demographic factors or neighbour characteristics of this area, or are they independent, like income or house?
When observing the geographical patterns in personality, do these patterns somehow reflect adaptive behaviour? For example, when people with high extraversion are living in one specific place of London, does this give people with high extraversion some kind of benefit in terms of happiness or well-being? This is a really important question, because when observing the average patterns of spatial clustering of individuals of different regions, there is an underlying assumption that people with certain characteristics live in certain areas because they are the happiest in that place.
The results show, how the five factors of personality (extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience) are distributed in the Greater London area. 
The findings regarding extraversion were, that South-West of London has a cluster of high extraversion. On the other side, West end, East and South London have lower level of extraversion. Neuroticism seems to have, to a certain extent, a similar pattern than extraversion, only inverted.
The central part of London has the lowest levels, while the West, East and North-East have the highest levels of neuroticism.
Agreeableness shows an interesting pattern. Low levels of agreeableness in the central area, Westminster and city centre. This pattern supports the general idea of stereotypes that within the most urban part of the cities people do not care about each other and they only think about themselves. 
While in the surrounding area of central London, people have higher levels of agreeableness.
The area of Hackney has the highest levels of openness to experience. The further from the centre, the lower the levels of openness to experience become. These findings go along with the stereotype, given that the central area is full of art and music scenes and therefore higher openness to experience.
The interesting part of the personality trait of conscientiousness is, that lower levels of conscientiousness can be found at the same places as high openness to experience. Usually, personality traits are quite independent from each other, with a small correlation between high openness to experience and high conscientiousness. But on the geographical level there seems to be an inverse relationship. So surprisingly, people with high openness to experience seem to have lower levels of conscientiousness, as in they do not tend to follow social norms or rules. There might be a connection to alcohol as well.
To summarize, the conclusion of these results is that: personality traits do cluster in specific places within London. So, it could be argued, that personality does indeed fall into some geographical patterns.
Cluster analysis implies that overall, there are spatial correlations and clustering of different characteristics. The analysis shows that openness to experience is the most evenly clustered personality trait, with the spatial autocorrelation of 0.77. Openness to experience is followed by extraversion with a spatial autocorrelation of 0.45. Conscientiousness is the least clustered personality trait, with the spatial autocorrelation of 0.22. The lower autocorrelations indicate slight clustering of personality traits, but do not cluster near as much as openness to experience does.
When compared the correlations between personality traits and different districts, as in socio-demographic neighbourhood, the results showed that openness to experience and extraversion share a similar amount of correlations between neighbourhood characteristics. High openness to experience is found in places with a high population density, high house prices, lower proportion of old people, and smaller proportion of families with children. Extraversion seems to share all of these correlations. Therefore, is safe to assume that high openness to experience and high extraversion reflect urban single people's personality profile in terms of neighbourhood characteristics.
The other correlations between neighbourhood characteristics are between agreeableness and conscientiousness. Agreeableness can be found in areas with high proportion of older people, high proportion of families with children, lower house prices. High agreeableness in combination with high conscientiousness seem to draw a picture of »suburban family type« personality profile in terms of neighbourhood characteristics.
Also, a regression model was built to understand how much of the variance can be predicted with personality traits by neighbourhood characteristics. Openness to experience is the trait that can be most predicted by neighbourhood characteristics (80%), such as population density, house prices.. The trait that can be least predicted by neighbourhood characteristics is neuroticism, which predicts 24%. These results suggest that this is the most independent personality trait, independent of socio-demographic factors. Agreeableness and conscientiousness are around the same values (between 25% and 35%). Extraversion can predict 45% of the variance.
As a comparison, the personality map of Edinburgh showed that central Edinburgh has high scores in extraversion, low agreeableness, lower levels of conscientiousness, and high levels of openness to experience.
The research shows that some of these patterns seem to replicate across different cities within Britain and the United States. Especially, high openness to experience and low agreeableness seem to follow the same pattern. Also the correlation between high openness to experience and low conscientiousness seem to hold across different cities.
When observing these geographical patterns in personality, these patterns do somehow reflect adaptive behaviour. Results show that, high openness to experience is positively associated with life satisfaction (0.47), by living in areas with high openness to experience. People seem to have higher scores of life satisfaction in areas with high extraversion, low agreeableness and low conscientiousness, than in other areas.
Extraversion and neuroticism are the strongest predictors of life satisfaction on the individual level on overall.
Extraversion and neuroticism traits are not correlated with any neighbourhood characteristics, and therefore, support the idea that the correlation between extraversion and neuroticism with life satisfaction reflects some sort of inherent processes within the individual, without needing some external mechanisms to mediate those patterns.
The association between agreeableness and conscientiousness with higher life satisfaction are stronger in areas where there is in average low life satisfaction. This means that, in areas with high life satisfaction, an individual who is highly agreeable or highly conscientious, would not be satisfied as much as he would be if he was living in an area with low life satisfaction. These traits seem to become more important when there is lower life satisfaction.
In conclusion, personality traits seem to be geographically distributed, and they seem to have systematic patterns that go along with different kinds of spatial patterns. These patterns are related to a certain degree to personality traits and socio-demographic neighbourhood characteristics. Neuroticism seems less related to socio-demographics than openness to experience. There is evidence, regarding openness to experience, that some of the average patterns might reflect some sort of adaptive behaviour. People manage to move into areas where they would get more life satisfaction as a impact of better match between their personality and average personality of those areas.
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