myPersonality Research

We used our huge personality database to look at differences between the ‘average’ personality in countries across the world. These results are already used in our Personality Matches feature which finds the country whose personality profile matches yours the closest.

Below we have mapped the Openness ranks of the 121 countries that we had sufficient data for. Dark blue and a high rank denotes a high Openness trait score.

A couple of things we noticed were the very high openness scores across almost all of Europe, including Eastern Europe, with the notable exception of the UK and Ireland who consider themselves far more traditional. The Middle East is another area whose inhabitants put more emphasis on traditional values.

We will post another map each upcoming Sunday for the other 4 traits.

Method & Results

Data from 484,834 myPersonality users who had taken 20 or more questions from the Big Five measure make up these results, from across 121 countries in the world. We set the criterion for inclusion at just 45 users, so there are actually 26 countries with fewer than 100 participants. This is not enough users to come to a reliable conclusion about the personality profile of a whole country, however, it was decided that it would be most interesting to show the breadth of countries on this map so that geographical areas of high and low scores could be seen.

Another caveat about making conclusions about a single country is that myPersonality’s tests are currently only available in English. So it is quite possible that people in a country who can read English and have internet access to use Facebook are not representative of other people in that country. For example, countries in the Middle East generally have a low Openness score, however Iran’s is fairly high. It may be that Iranians are less traditional than their Middle Eastern counterparts, or it may be that Iranians who are less traditional have been using Facebook more.

We’d like to thank Ammap who provided the mapping feature we have used.