
New research plots personality distribution across UK - ColinWright
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31816926
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Someone1234
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.

~~~
agilebyte
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.

~~~
arethuza
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_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_Kingdom)

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

~~~
agilebyte
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?

~~~
arethuza
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...](https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-tolkiens-
batmen/)

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garblegarble
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.

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

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sthreet
"BBC Lab UK tests are now closed"

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

~~~
zhte415
Doesn't seem to be closed. I just tried and it worked fine (non UK IP).

~~~
liotier
> (non UK IP).

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

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

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Silhouette
Live in Cambridge.

Get told ideal place to live is Oxford.

My degree of agreeableness has just plummeted. ;-)

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tansey
Is the raw data available anywhere?

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dene22
Would be interesting to see any correlation between personality type and areas
that have fluoridated water supplies.

~~~
arethuza
Plenty of data here on fluoridation in the UK here:

[http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Fluoride/Pages/Introduction.asp...](http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Fluoride/Pages/Introduction.aspx)

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

