Personality of place: Regional psychosocial characteristics of economic activity

ABSTRACT

Increasingly, social scientists are recognizing the limitations of traditional measures (e.g., geographic, demographic, economic) when trying to explain differing regional prosperity outcomes. This research seeks to understand how regions’ differing personalities can help describe economic variance. We test this by employing least squares linear regression on an exploratory battery of 16 psychosocial variables (the “Big 5” personality profiles, plus other General Social Survey items) and four dependent variables of economic output: per capita income, employment rates, income mobility, and rates of entrepreneurship. All items, aggregated at the county level across the US, exhibited a unique constellation of relationships, emphasizing the great need for more work on the economic impact of what we coin the personality of place.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional economics
• Economic development
• Personality
• Culture

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Gladys Selfridge and Gina Carlton at the UC San Diego Center for Applied Research and Evaluation for their help in cleaning and organizing datasets. The authors also thank Timothy Slaper for his leadership of the Regional Economic Development research project. Finally, the authors would like to express their appreciation to the Economic Development Association of the US Department of Commerce for providing funding support for this research.

Notes

¹ Reported in a speech by Jon Clifton of Gallup in 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=116&v=7gYHuCYnnT8.

Additional information

Funding

This publication was prepared by Raphael Cuomo, Daniel Davis, Josh Shapiro, and Mary Walshok at the University of California San Diego Extension, using [Federal funds] awarded to the Trustees of Indiana University and as a sub-component under award number [ED17HDQ3120040] from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Economic Development Administration or the U.S. Department of Commerce.