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New Research Finds That Certain Personalities Flock to Certain Cities

Eric Jaffe, October 11, 2010, The Infrastructurist vai Planetizen

Today many Americans—or, at least, federal employees — celebrate the day Columbus discovered the continent. (Like we wouldn’t have found it eventually anyway.) In the centuries since, people have spread across this great land in predictable pockets of personality. Yet only recently have psychologists paid attention to the reasons certain people land in certain cities — a subject known as “urban psychology.”

To redress this oversight, the September issue of the American Psychologist includes a pair of studies that examine just how certain character traits vary across urban centers in the United States. The results aren’t always surprising, but they’re certainly noteworthy, and will no doubt invite some strong debate among commenters.

One of these studies was conducted by University of Michigan psychologists Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson (abstract only). While an “urban–rural dichotomy” is often explored in popular culture, the “possibility of variation across cities in the lives of their residents” isn’t studied nearly as often, they write. The work builds off recent observations made by Richard Florida, whose 2008 bestseller Who’s Your City described how the so-called personality of a city indeed reflects the personalities of its residents.

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