February 11th, 2009
David
With Valentines Day coming up, perhaps you’re wondering whether couples really are happier than single people. myPersonality had a look at the relationship between Facebook Relationship Status and Life Satisfaction. Unfortunately for the single people out there, those smug couples you see really are smug for a good reason – they do tend to be happier than single people.
As can be seen in the below graph, the happiest people are those that are married, followed by those that are engaged. Surprisingly, people who say that their relationship is “complicated” are just as satisfied as single people. That suggests that even if a relationship goes wrong, it won’t be any worse than not having one at all. So our advice is that if you’re interested in someone, tell them! What’s to lose? However, there’s no point just ringing up that person you spent a drunken night with last week, as being in an open relationship also won’t improve your life satisfaction.
Method & Results
Read more…
myPersonality has drawn maps of how the personalities of different states in the US differ. The most friendly and outgoing Americans are in the deep south, people on the east of America are less relaxed than people on the west, and the most trusting people are in the north western states.
myPersonality has also created a new feature that compares your personality to the personalities of each US State, and tells you which one is closest. Take myPersonality’s Big Five questionnaire to find out which state reflects your personality.
Openness |
Conscientiousness |
Extraversion |
|
Agreeableness |
Neuroticism |
| Click the images to view a larger version |
|
Method and Results
Read more…
myPersonality added the Satisfaction with Life Scale earlier this summer in collaboration with a project that Dr Richard Tunney was running for the UK National Lottery examining the connection between the number and quality of friendships that people have and their satisfaction with life. In myPersonality, the Scale allows you to quantify how happy they are with your life, to compare this to other people including your friends and the general population, and then suggests areas that research has suggested to concentrate on in order to improve your score.
The results of the research project (from other sources as well as myPersonality) have been released today, which show that having 10 or more old friends is more likely to give you a higher satisfaction with life score, but that increasing this number is not so likely to help. This suggests that people should spend time cultivating their oldest and closest friendships.
There is coverage of this in various news outlets including: The Daily Mail, The Sun, PhysOrg.com
Just in case you wondered whether myPersonality’s research was stalled, I can assure you it is not! We’ve been looking at some more substantial questions than the ones already answered here. These take some time to analyse, and then we’re looking towards academic publication which usually requires that findings haven’t already been published elsewhere (including here). However, the plan is to put research findings on this blog as soon as we can, and we’re pretty excited about what we’ve been able to look at already.
Users who add the star sign personality feature are asked:
With the caveat that people who opt-in to the myPersonality star sign feature are not necessarily the same as people who do not, we can have a look at the frequency graph for star sign belief.
1 = strongly disagree, 2 = slightly disagree, 3 = no opinion, 4 = slightly agree, 5 = strongly agree.
As is shown, just 4.6% of respondents believed strongly in the ability of horoscopes to provide information that would be useful to guide a decision, compared to 23.3% of respondents who believed strongly in the opposite. Perhaps surprisingly though, the number of people who leaned towards a negative opinion of the usefulness of horoscope information was almost equal to the number of people who leaned towards a positive opinion (17,359 negatively, 14,791 positively). The biggest difference is that people who leaned negatively tended to have a strong opinion that horoscopes provide no useful information, whereas those who learned postively weren’t so sure, electing for “slightly agree” rather than “strongly agree”.
Method and Results
Read more…
