A study in the United States explored the relationship between personality traits and the landscape characteristics of a person’s living area. The results indicated that individuals in urban areas tend to be slightly more open to new experiences and somewhat less conscientious. In contrast, coastal area residents often exhibit slightly higher levels of neuroticism and openness, but lower levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness. Meanwhile, those living in cultivated areas (e.g. farmland) appeared slightly more conservative. However, it’s important to note that these associations were small in magnitude. The paper was published in the Journal of Personality.
The diversity of human habitats is remarkable. Many people reside in densely populated urban environments characterized by multi-story and high-rise buildings, while others live in suburban neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes and ground-level buildings. Some reside in rural or sparsely populated areas, where houses can be far apart. Additionally, while some individuals live near large bodies of water in coastal areas, others are situated inland, often far from any significant water bodies. People inhabit regions that vary widely in temperature and infrastructure, from extremely cold to very hot, and from densely to sparsely populated.
While people cannot choose the area where they will be born and have little influence on what their place of residence will be while they are children, most adults are able to move and change their place of residence if they wish. To explain changes in the place of residence, scientists have formulated the selective migration hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that people will tend to selectively move to regions that satisfy their needs. In time, this process would create regional clusters of individuals with similar psychological characteristics. Scientific research suggests that psychological characteristics of residents of different geographical areas are not uniform, supporting this hypothesis.
Study authors Ioana E. Militaru and her colleagues proposed that the composition of the landscape i.e., whether it primarily consists of forests, grasslands, wetland, or artificial surfaces, may also contribute to the spatial variation in personality. They conducted a study to assess whether landscape characteristics are associated with personality traits of people that live there.
The researchers used personality trait data collected from almost 4 million U.S. participants. These data were collected between 2002 and 2015 in the scope of the Gosling-Potter Internet Personality Project (GPIPP). This project features a website that offers users feedback on several measures, including personality inventories.
The personality measure used in this study was based on the Big Five personality model. This model proposes the existence of five personality traits representing broad features of human personality – openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Openness to experience involves characteristics like imagination, insight, and a broad range of interests. Conscientiousness implies high levels of thoughtfulness, good impulse control, and goal-directed behaviors, often manifesting as a tendency to be organized and mindful of details. Extraversion is characterized by excitability, sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness, and high amounts of emotional expressiveness. Individuals with pronounced agreeableness are characterized by attributes such as trust, altruism, kindness, affection, and general proneness to prosocial behaviors. Neuroticism involves moodiness, sadness, and emotional instability, often associated with a tendency towards anxiety, worry, and jealousy.
The authors matched participants’ survey responses with land cover data from their ZIP codes, encompassing 32,657 U.S. ZIP codes in total. The land cover information was derived from satellite imagery. They categorized landscapes into 11 types, including cultivated land, forests, grasslands, shrubs, wetlands, water bodies, tundra, artificial surfaces, bare land, glaciers, and oceans.
Results showed that artificial surfaces and cultivated land had the strongest associations with personality. Individuals with more pronounced openness to experience tended to live more frequently in areas dominated by artificial surfaces. Such individuals were also more often found living near oceans and water bodies, as well as in areas with higher average temperature. On the other hand, individuals living in wetlands or on cultivated land tended to be a bit lower on this trait.
People living on artificial surfaces tended to be a bit less conscientious, while this trait was a bit more pronounced in individuals living in wetlands. Extraverted individuals were a bit less frequent in areas dominated by artificial surfaces and shrub, but a bit more frequent near water bodies and cultivated land. Individuals living in wetlands tended to be somewhat more agreeable, while this trait tended to be lower in residents of areas dominated by artificial surfaces, shrub, and oceans. Residents of wetlands and artificial surfaces tended to be a bit lower on neuroticism.
“Taken together, our results suggest that landscape categories that incur more human interventions such as cultivated land and artificial surface are significantly associated with human personality,” the study authors concluded. “The relationships between personality traits and landscapes that provide the backdrop for human activity to a lesser extent, such as grassland, wetland, water bodies and oceans, are less stable across analytic approaches. Lastly, personality traits do not appear to be significantly associated with landscapes that are freer from human interference, such as forests, bare lands, shrub, or glaciers and permanent snow.”
The study sheds light on the links between human personality and characteristics of landscapes people live in. However, it should be noted that all of the reported associations are almost zero and only detectable because the number of participants was so extremely large. Residents of all these different types of areas likely have a full range of personality trait levels. While the reported associations likely do exist in the population, their magnitude is negligible for most practical purposes.
The paper, “The lay of the land: Associations between environmental features and personality”, was authored by Ioana E. Militaru, Gregory Serapio-Garcia, Tobias Ebert, Wenyuan Kong, Samuel D. Gosling, Jeff Potter, Peter J. Rentfrow, and Friedrich M Götz.