myPersonality Research

Our latest map based on myPersonality data is for aggregate Neuroticism. Dark purple and a high rank denotes a high Neuroticism score, suggesting that the country’s population considers themselves in touch with their emotions but are liable to get stressed our more easily. Lighter purple and a low rank denotes a low Neuroticism score, suggesting that the population are more laid back than other countries’ citizens but at the extremes may be too emotionless. Sometimes a bit of stress is important in order to spur one to get something finished.

Countries clustered around the Mediterranean tend to have high Neuroticism scores, whereas those in Central America seem to have particularly low scores.

Next week will bring our final world map, for the Agreeableness trait. Which countries do you think will be the most competitive or most cooperative?

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.