Do you consider yourself an agreeable person? Or when it comes down to it are you more neurotic than conscientious? How about those around you? Whatever your personality, whether you find yourself feeling right in sync with your neighbors, or are left feeling like a man, or woman, in a high and lonely castle, it might not be a question of whether you are wrong or right--objectively speaking, you may just be living in the wrong neighborhood.

A few months ago, the results of an intriguing study of personality types was published in the Boston Globe. Contained within the results of hundreds of thousands of individual personality surveys compiled by psychologists Jason Rentfrow, Sam Gosling, and Jeff Porter, a team of analysts led by Richard Florida noticed an intriguing trend. That is: personality types tend to cluster. All in all: Like-minded individuals seek same for fun and profit.

Psychologists have long established that the human personality can be broken down into five basic factors.: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. These are what is known as "The Big Five", a key component of American Environics' own American Values Survey. Each of these factors has been found to affect crucial choices in an individual's life: from basic life expectancy, marital status, political ideology, job outcomes, performance and innovation, to creativity. 

What Florida and his team found was that not only do these personality types tend to cluster together, the country's psychogeography tended to line-up surprisingly well with its economic geography. 

Of course, if you're wondering (like I was) which came first: the people or the predisposition? Is this the case of like-minded individuals flocking to a certain place -- like the San Francisco Bay Area or New York for those Open to Experience types -- or is it the place itself that affects the development of those within it? In the great chicken and egg race, no one can be sure. What we can extrapolate from this is that clustering exists, and that it could prove incredibly useful for everyone from city planners struggling over what type of public works projects to push for, to a company's decision on where to locate their regional office.

Perhaps somewhere down the line, an American of the future will plop themselves down in front of a library computer terminal in Mechanicsburg, Indiana, and, utilizing software developed with these models in mind, might base everything from their own new home in Atlanta (because they're an extroverted type) to their favorite sporting events and clubs on these models; and, arguably, he or she might come up quite satisfied to have found themselves in like-minded company.

Hailing originally from Southern Ohio, I personally can't understand how my birthplace scored so high on the neurotic level, but I am personally determined to worry about it and blow that fact entirely out of proportion. 

Richard Florida's original column is worth the read in and of itself. Check it out, via the Boston Globe: Where do all the neurotics live?

Also check out the full personality maps here

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal also has great coverage on the Renfrow, Gosling and Porter model, plus an expansive state-by-state interactive graphic here.

The same kinds of social values that determine whether or not one subscribes to landline telephone service - social values our company tracks like Aversion to Complexity, Technology Anxiety, Tried and True - impacts their decisions as voters. Importantly for 2008 (and beyond), pollsters that treat landline and cell phone only voters the same are making less than accurate predictions.

Traditional public opinion polling has evolved over the years, but since the latter part of the 20th Century how those surveys are conducted hasn't changed all that much. To completely oversimplify, the process is pretty straightforward: get a representative sample of respondents on the telephone, design an instrument that asks good questions, weight the sample when appropriate and run the crosstabs.

While all of those steps are important to ensure accuracy, pollsters tightly hold their secret formulas for weighting samples. It's the industry's version of KFC's 13 original spices. Virtually all pollsters, however, when thinking about weighting do so by weighting a combination of demographic information or partisanship.

In the last few years changes in technology have complicated matters a bit for pollsters. The rise of the use of cell phones and caller ID have skewed the kinds of people that answer survey calls and agree to participate in the research. There has been a tremendous amount of debate in the pollster world, for example, about cell phones. For a long time, cell phones were excluded from most polling research. While many (if not most) pollsters now try to incorporate cell phone numbers into their research, the response rate is often different between landline and cell phone respondents.

Continue reading "Cell Phones, Landlines and the 2008 Election" »

Without question, the 2008 presidential election has been extraordinarily fascinating from a social values research perspective. The sheer volume of public and private polling, the insertion of complex reactions about race, gender and age, the long primary fight, and the creation of a very different electoral map has made this race important fascinating to watch from a social values perspective.

Barack Obama's candidacy results in a set of issues around race, multiculturalism, and comfort with change that challenge a lot of the earlier assumptions about America, the electorate, and the political parties. As the political class has done since polling began, there has been a number of attempts to identify the key demographic groups that will decide the election. But few have been able to paint a robust picture of the segment, or segments, of the electorate that will decide the election. It's simply not accurate to say that Barack Obama has a problem with white voters, or older voters, or independent voters. Some whites, seniors and independents are less likely to support Obama, but there are an awful lot of enthusiastic white, senior and independent Obama supporters as well.

American Environics has conducted some fascinating research to attempt to identify the important swing segments in the 2008 election based not on demographics, but on social values. Using our social values research methodology, we've done both quantitative and qualitative research to understand the underlying worldviews of these voters, and how their conscious and unconscious reasoning drives their decision making on the presidential race.

We're in the process of analyzing the data and will have the results of the research available soon. So stay tuned to the blog where we'll release our unique findings.

McCain the Maverick adopts one the absolute worst Democratic ideas...

One of the most underreported, but important, aspects of Barack Obama's successful campaign for the Democratic nomination is how he ran largely on an overarching and broad narrative and rejected the interest group politics that has defined Democratic politics for an entire generation. The post-Watergate generation of Democratic operatives looked at the electorate as a series of voters aligned with a series of interest groups. The calculus was simple: appeal to enough of these groups and put together a coalition that gets you enough votes to win an election. The strategy went something like: teachers-plus-veterans-plus-labor-plus-African Americans = 50.1%. It was simple, allowed for the empowerment of the most active interest groups on the left, and was the roadmap used by most national Democratic campaigns in recent decades. But it didn't work. Sure, Bill Clinton won in 1992 and 1996, but both of those wins owed a lot to Ross Perot.

Continue reading "Welcome, Republicans, to Interest Group Politics" »