New research plots personality distribution across UK | Hacker News Reader

New research plots personality distribution across UK

bbc.co.uk

40 pointsColinWright17 comments

It is interesting that a couple of areas score well on both agreeableness AND extrovertedness.

I wonder regarding London which way round it is, do the people who live there NEED to be louder to be heard, or is it that people live there because they're louder already thus the crowded environment meshes better with their preexisting personality.

I've always known I have no desire to live in London. I might commute there, but I'd never live there. Hampshire is more my scene, quite, pretty, but work still gets done.

Big Five personality traits have a decent association with social class (1). I think what the map is showing is that the social class split is uneven in Britain.

Positive association with higher social class: Extraversion, Opennes and especially Conscientiousness.

Negative association with higher social class: Neuroticism, Agreeableness.

1: Chapman. B. P., Fiscella, K., Kawachi, I., & Duberstein, P. R. (2010). Personality, socioeconomic status, and all-cause mortality in the United States. American Journal of Epidemiology, 171, 83–92.

My understanding is that social class is a lot more complex in the UK than in the US - particularly "upper class" doesn't mean "wealthy", at least traditionally.

e.g. My wife had a relative who had millions in the bank but was resolutely and proudly working class.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_...

Note that I am most definitely not trying to defend the UK class system - it is profoundly weird at times.

Say Conscientiousness is about being organized and dependable. Would you say that higher social strata exhibit these characteristics, more so than in the lower echelons, even in UK?

Well, I've never met someone from the upper class (i.e. aristocracy) - but I wouldn't say "organized and dependable" are the first words that come to mind when thinking about aristocrats.... :-)

Actually, one notable example of viewing the working class as "organized and dependable" is Sam from Lord of the Rings - who is based on Tolkien's batmen from when he served on the Western Front as an officer (being middle class he was naturally an officer):

“My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”

https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-to...

Strange that they didn't include Northern Ireland in their research, it would have been interesting to have data for the whole of the UK rather than just part of it.

Indeed. Mods, can we get the title of this post changed? It's slightly misleading as it is.

"In a handful of districts the response was too small to be reliable, which is why Northern Ireland was excluded."

"BBC Lab UK tests are now closed"

That is lame. I wanted to see how they got these values.

Doesn't seem to be closed. I just tried and it worked fine (non UK IP).

> (non UK IP).

UKIP members would rank rather low in Openness and high in Neuroticism...

Can I have a link to where you tried it?

I have always said that the further from London you get the nicer the people are.

Live in Cambridge.

Get told ideal place to live is Oxford.

My degree of agreeableness has just plummeted. ;-)

Is the raw data available anywhere?

Would be interesting to see any correlation between personality type and areas that have fluoridated water supplies.

Plenty of data here on fluoridation in the UK here:

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Fluoride/Pages/Introduction.asp...

Of course the NHS is socialist so the purity of their essences may already have been compromised.

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