• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Health

Does your community have a personality type?

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
February 7, 2024
in Health
Reading Time: 4 mins read
0
Personality of Communities
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

Geographic sorting along ideological lines is on the rise. Counties and regions of the United States differ in political ideology. But do they differ in personality as well? Further, are people who ‘fit’ their communities healthier, happier, or more highly achieving than those who do not?

Personality of Communities

Credit: Florida Atlantic University

Geographic sorting along ideological lines is on the rise. Counties and regions of the United States differ in political ideology. But do they differ in personality as well? Further, are people who ‘fit’ their communities healthier, happier, or more highly achieving than those who do not?

In the context of these growing divisions and to address this question, a study by Florida Atlantic University’s Kevin Lanning, Ph.D., senior author and a professor of psychology and data science in the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College on FAU’s John D. MacArthur Campus in Jupiter, and collaborators used data from the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment to investigate the impact of person-community fit on education, health and well-being.

First, they assessed fit using the traditional methods of response surface analysis and profile similarity. However, in each of these approaches, scores for individuals are typically compared with community averages, raising interpretive challenges because there is inevitably greater variability among individuals than there is among communities.

As such, Lanning and his research team introduced a novel approach to conceptualizing person-community fit, predicated on the idea that communities, like persons, are diverse, and can include multiple environmental niches. In these analyses, researchers illustrate this idea with a simple typology, one in which they assign people to types based on their single-most extreme score across the set of the big five traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

For example, an ‘extraverted’ type is someone for whom the average response across the extraversion items is positive and relatively more extreme than that for any of the remaining traits; similarly, a ‘stable’ type is someone whose most extreme average response was low in neuroticism. Communities were then described in terms of the percent of people in each of the types. 

Results of the study, published in the journal Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, showed that whereas traditional approaches have typically found only modest personality differences between communities, the new typological approach revealed more substantial effects. For example, the percentage of open-minded people in Manhattan is roughly twice that of people in Detroit, while those in Detroit are twice as likely as Manhattanites to be classified as conscientious.

In Palm Beach and Broward counties, the proportions of open and conscientious people are roughly the same. Among counties with more than 500 respondents, Bexar County, San Antonio had the highest proportion of agreeable people, while Manhattan had the highest proportion of open persons, but the lowest proportion of people who were agreeable or conscientious.

“It’s important to note that when comparing different counties, small counties are inevitably more likely to show up at the extremes. In addition, our sample is unlikely to be representative of most counties. For both of these reasons, comparisons between individual counties should be made with caution,” said Lanning.

Lanning’s team also found some support for the claim that people whose personalities match many others in the community are happier (higher in well-being), more likely to engage in healthful behaviors, and attain higher levels of schooling relative to their parents.

In short, communities are diverse in terms of personality as well as demographics, and having like-minded people in one’s community is associated with positive outcomes. 

“Just as the ethnic character of a community can be described by proportions of different ethnic groups, the psychological character of a community may, perhaps, best be understood by a set of proportions of psychological types,” said Lanning. “To the extent that communities are diverse, people can ‘fit’ in multiple ways. One way to capture this idea is by describing both persons and communities in terms of types.”

Study co-authors are Geoff Wetherell, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology within FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science; Gwen Gardner, Ph.D., University of Toronto; Sara Weston, Ph.D., and David Condon, Ph.D., both with the University of Oregon.

– FAU –

About Florida Atlantic University:
Florida Atlantic University, established in 1961, officially opened its doors in 1964 as the fifth public university in Florida. Today, the University serves more than 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students across six campuses located along the southeast Florida coast. In recent years, the University has doubled its research expenditures and outpaced its peers in student achievement rates. Through the coexistence of access and excellence, FAU embodies an innovative model where traditional achievement gaps vanish. FAU is designated a Hispanic-serving institution, ranked as a top public university by U.S. News & World Report and a High Research Activity institution by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For more information, visit www.fau.edu.

 



Journal

Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology

DOI

10.1016/j.cresp.2024.100180

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

On person-community fit: Trait-, person-, and type-based approaches to measurement

Article Publication Date

5-Jan-2024

Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

Monoclonal Antibodies Shield Against Drug-Resistant Klebsiella

October 1, 2025
blank

Oncotarget Editor-in-Chief Wafik S. El-Deiry to Chair 2025 WIN Symposium in Partnership with APM in Philadelphia

October 1, 2025

Linking Nurses’ Emotional Skills to Care Competence

October 1, 2025

Tracking Ovarian Cancer Evolution via Cell-Free DNA

October 1, 2025

POPULAR NEWS

  • New Study Reveals the Science Behind Exercise and Weight Loss

    New Study Reveals the Science Behind Exercise and Weight Loss

    90 shares
    Share 36 Tweet 23
  • Physicists Develop Visible Time Crystal for the First Time

    74 shares
    Share 30 Tweet 19
  • New Study Indicates Children’s Risk of Long COVID Could Double Following a Second Infection – The Lancet Infectious Diseases

    65 shares
    Share 26 Tweet 16
  • How Donor Human Milk Storage Impacts Gut Health in Preemies

    64 shares
    Share 26 Tweet 16

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

Early-Onset Gastric Cancer Trends in BRICS

Monoclonal Antibodies Shield Against Drug-Resistant Klebsiella

High-Frame Ultrasound Reveals Liver Cancer Insights

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Success! An email was just sent to confirm your subscription. Please find the email now and click 'Confirm' to start subscribing.

Join 60 other subscribers
  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.