Where you live 'reflects how grumpy you are', study claims

Where you live 'reflects how grumpy you are', study claims

The region where you choose to live reflects your personality, according to a study by Cambridge University, because people with similar characters tend to cluster together.

By Lucy Cockcroft
Last Updated: 9:21PM BST 19 Apr 2009

It found that those who settle in London are the most hardworking, creative, intellectual and extrovert of all Britons, but they also tend to be the grumpiest.

The inhabitants of Devon, Cornwall, Northumberland and Tyneside are apparently the least outgoing and the most neurotic, while people who live in the East Midlands are cheerful and conscientious.

Researchers at Cambridge are drawing up a 'personality map' of Britain, which shows that regional trends are becoming more amplified as people with similar character traits increasingly gravitate to the same areas.

Overall, more intelligent people with extrovert, open personalities moved to cities while the more introverted and relaxed settled in villages or small towns.

Jason Rentfrow, who led the study, said that where personality types would once have been distributed randomly across Britain, increased mobility had led to clusters.

He said: "People's level of satisfaction with their lives is strongly affected by where they live. Our findings suggest they are happiest where their personalities most closely resemble that of the other people in that area."

Mr Rentfrow has already published a personality map of America, in which he charted variations in five traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and intellect.

The results, based on more than 600,000 questionnaires, confirmed that personalities are not distributed randomly but are becoming clustered into distinct geographic patterns.

He found that people living on the east coast of America, especially New England, were relatively stressed, irritable and depressed, while those on the west coast were more emotionally stable, calm and relaxed.

Mr Rentfrow has collected the profiles of 11,088 people in Britain and has found a similar trend emerging.

He says that the character traits of Londoners are now so amplified and different from those of other regions that it has become almost like "another country".

Mr Rentfrow said: "London is becoming psychologically separate from the rest of the nation.

"People in London tend to be, on average, more analytical, assertive, dominant, efficient and creative. People in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are less open-minded, more traditional and less tolerant of differences."

His results challenge a previous theory, put forward by Thomas Friedman, who, in his book The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, that globalisation would iron out regional differences.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5183510/Where-you-live-reflects-how-grumpy-you-are-study-claims.html