myPersonality Research

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
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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
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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
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If the data from MyPersonality is going to mean anything, the distribution of trait scores needs to be somewhere close to a normal distribution. That is, a curve with most of the people in the middle and a few people on each side. The graphs below plot the number of people who have each trait score (from 0 – 100%). The good news is, they’re nice and smooth curves! You can click on the thumbnails to see the full graph, which also includes the mean and standard deviation scores.

Some features to point out:

• Unfortunately there are slight ceiling effects on the openness and extroversion distributions, since quite a lot of people have 100%, so it’s reasonable to assume that if it was possible some people would have 105% or even 110%.
• The extroversion trait score has the highest variability. The standard deviation is the highest at just over 19% – which means that it has the greatest average deviation from the mean. If you look at the frequency you’ll also notice that the highest peak in the extroversion trait does not reach 10,000 people – whereas the others are all higher than this. This is because less people are ‘average’.

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In MyPersonality, people run the Big Five personality test and then have the option of running the star sign personality section, which compares their personality to the one that their star sign predicts. Even deciding to check your star sign personality though might say something about you, so MyPersonality had a look by comparing the personalities of people that have added the star sign feature with the personalities of people that haven’t.

You can see in the table below that people who have added the star sign feature have a very slightly higher openness trait score (+2.4%), which seems consistent with the idea that people who are interested in unconventional ideas like star signs are more likely to be open to new experiences. However, the other differences are less explainable, particularly why people on average who run the star sign feature have a lower extroversion score than those who do not (-2.6%).

Although all of the differences are statistically significant to a high degree of probability (see below the cut for the statistical stuff), is the fact that people who are interested in their star sign personality have a 2.4% higher openness trait score very interesting? Possibly not, but it does demonstrate that scientists can’t assume that people who opt-in to an experiment are the same as the people who don’t.

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