Conscientiousness World Map
Continuing our aggregate trait mapping series, below we include the world map for Conscientiousness based on myPersonality data. Dark green and a high rank denotes a high Conscientiousness trait score, suggesting that citizens like to plan their actions in advance and complete their tasks reliably. Low Conscientiousness scores indicate that they consider themselves more flexible, and may be more able to cope when things go wrong and a plan cannot be followed rigidly.
Central and Northern Europe seems to be the least conscientious area, although the pattern is not clear cut as Germany and Switzerland are relatively better at planning than those around them, whereas much of Africa describe themselves as the most conscientious.
The remaining 2 traits will follow in the coming weeks! Next week: Neuroticism.
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.
why the color is bright green… it’s hard to differentiate…
Hi Ariady, we just changed the high Conscientiousness colour to a less bright green. You might find it better if you refresh the page (although sometimes it doesn’t refresh the map because the data is cached on your computer).
Why not apply a cluster algorithm to the data of average personalities of the different countries?
saffecool – that’s a good plan, we were thinking about doing something like that after we’ve put the individual maps up. So watch this space.
The world mapping of this trait – Conscientiousness – can give some clues on the ability of countries to cope with global economic crises. As the nature of global economy is
vulnerable/volatile, many scholars recommend flexibility (low conscientiousness) in order to deal with very fast changes of capital flows.
That’s an interesting hypothesis, Sueli. But how would one test that? Could one compare the change in GDP since the collapse of the financial markets with the average conscientiousness trait score? Perhaps it would be better to do it within a country, like the US – I imagine there is data on economic growth by US state. One would have to take into account lots of other potential factors though.