For a country that features the word United so prominently in its name, the U.S. is a pretty fractious place. We splinter along fault lines of income, education, religion, race, hyphenated origin, age and politics. Then too there’s temperament. We’re coarse or courtly, traditionalist or rebel, amped up or laid-back. And it’s no secret that a lot of that seems to be determined by — or at least associated with — where we live.
Now a multinational team of researchers led by psychologist and American expat Jason Rentfrow of the University of Cambridge in the U.K. has sought to draw the regional lines more clearly, literally mapping the American mood, with state-by-state ratings of personality and temperament.
Using personality test data from over one million people, researchers have identified three distinct personality regions in the country. Here, each state is colored by the region it belongs to and shaded according to how strongly its personality matches that profile.
Want to know where you belong on this map? Click "Take the Test" and answer the 10-question survey to see which state most closely matches your personality. Results are not recorded or reported to any third party.
An American by birth but a resident of the U.K., Rentfrow has an innate familiarity with America’s regional differences, but also a certain distance from the white-hot way they’ve grown worse of late. For all the fretting we do over such factionalism, he’s not sure things are as bad as they seem.
“Political values may exaggerate the temperamental differences and a sense of tribalism may emerge,” he concedes, “but these things all come from a mix of common personality types. The Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic may be very different from the Rockies and the West, for example, but openness is a big part of both personality profiles.”
That simple idea might be the best message we can take from the study. We’re less a nation of warring tribes and angry camps than we are a loud, boisterous, messy mix of geography, social history and the unpredictable X factors of human personality, all trying to make a go of things under the same national flag. In other words, we’re exactly what the Founding Fathers intended us to be.
