Our Toronto correspondent, Lawrence Loh (congrats, Lawrence, you’ve just been upgraded), sends news on an intriguing study:
Just read another interesting article a friend showed me where they mapped personality types to neighbourhoods in London and found some interesting trends.
“The big takeaway: It’s not just social and economic forces that shape our neighborhoods. It’s psychological ones, too.”
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From CityLab:
What Your Personality Has to Do With Your Neighborhood
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A new study published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by an international group of psychologists … takes a detailed look at the intersection of personality and happiness in London. …
The study explores the neighborhood clustering of the five basic personality traits defined by the classic five-factor model: openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability (or lack of neuroticism). The researchers then examined the clustering of these personality traits and their effects on individuals’ happiness based on an online survey of some 56,000 people in the London metro area. …
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The last map plots life satisfaction. Unsurprisingly, the map roughly tracks the distribution of wealth throughout metro London, with happier residents generally clustered in the most well-to-do neighborhoods and those with lower levels of life satisfaction concentrated in areas of greater poverty and those with higher concentrations of ethnic minorities.
The study finds that neighborhood characteristics accounted for two-thirds of the variance in happiness across neighborhoods, indicating, as the researchers write, “a substantial link between sociodemographic factors and average life satisfaction of neighborhoods.”
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