Psycho-maps - May 07, 2008
Check out these maps highlighting where all the neurotic people live in the United States (and the extroverts, and the most agreeable people, etc), as published in Richard Florida's latest column (Boston Globe). The result is fascinating in a water-cooler kind of way. Look! All the neurotic people are in New York! Those open to new experiences cluster in California, etc. etc.
But we at Nature are left wondering exactly how these maps were made… It doesn’t say in the article how precisely how the data was collected, or if there might be a bias, for example, due to people living in cities being more involved in the study than others. It also doesn’t say whether the maps have been normalized for population density, though we hope they have. Okay, this is a column: you don't expect that kind of detail in a column. But then where can you get it? (I can't find a paper on the subject... Richard - help us out!)
The five personality traits highlighted are standard in psychology; you can take a test to assess your personal scores in these five traits online here (warning: you need to agree to a few conditions and it’ll take a while).
Florida is a regular columnist and “professor of business and creativity” at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. The field he is exploring here is that of ‘psychogeography’, which seems to be an emerging trend in social sciences.
Comments
Those maps can't possibly be normalized for population density. Most of what I'm getting off this map is that the East is heavily populated, and that outside of SoCal, no one lives in the West.
Posted by: Sanguinity | May 7, 2008 04:40 PM
I'm quite amazed anyone takes these maps seriously at all.
Look at the data. It shows large populations living in the open ocean and in the Great Lakes.
The densities all fall off radially and symmetrically. That's pretty amazing, every other human characteristic I've seen tends to be affected by things like wealth, population density, urbanization, etc. These all are not, they behave like some kind of physical field effect.
Until the actual data is published I suggest people take this "information" with a very large helping of salt.
Posted by: Ralph Brown | May 16, 2008 07:03 PM