Extraversion World Map
Continuing our series from last Sunday, below we include the world map for Extraversion based on myPersonality data. Dark red and a high rank denotes a high Extraversion trait score. A high extraversion score indicates that citizens consider themselves outgoing and most comfortable around other people. Low extraversion scores indicate that they consider themselves more content with their own company.
There are a cluster of countries in and around the Balkans that rate themselves as the most outgoing, whereas east and south-east Asians describe themselves as the most introverted.
It’s worth noting that averaging across a large country may mask variations between geographical areas within it. For example, myPersonality has already shown that aggregate personalities in the United States differ by State. If the most extraverted and least extraverted State within America were included on this map as countries, then the most extraverted State, Mississippi, would be ranked 119/123 and the least extraverted State, Delaware, would be ranked 28/123.
The other 3 traits will follow in the coming weeks!
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.
We’d like to thank Ammap who provided the mapping feature we have used.
Very interesting results (as are all the plots) but I find the rankings slightly counter-intuitive. I would expect the most extraverted country to be ranked 1 out of 121 and the least to be ranked 121 out of 121.
Hi Dan, the real answer is that I just did it without thinking too much and then didn’t want to change all of the numbers again. However in a way it’s good because the problem with ranking is that it’s as if 1 is the best and 121 is the worst, whereas none of the personality traits are necessarily good or bad – so the ‘ranks’ just signify that the aggregate trait level for a state is the smallest number (1) or the largest number (121) out of all of the countries. So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
@David
Ha! Fair enough.
Well your technique is probably awesome but your results are worthless. Saying that scandinavian people are more extravert than south europeans is just absurd. Everyguy that experienced the two cultures (and i did for years!) will tell you the exact opposite in 99% of cases…