In deciding where to live, you probably took many factors into account. These may have included whether you want an urban or suburban setting, the climate, the job opportunities available and the quality of the school district, just to name a few. However, you may have based the decision off of something less obvious but way closer to home.
Your personality type could actually help you figure out the best place for you to live. A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America looked at the relationship between personality traits and life satisfaction among people living in various locations in the London metropolitan area.
The researchers looked at how people with five personality types (openness to experience, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability [or lack of neuroticism]) clustered in London. They then compared this to the life satisfaction of residents based on an online survey of 56,000 people in the metropolis. In this study, each neighborhood of London is defined as one of its 219 postal codes. You can check out some interesting maps of the neighborhood clusters over at The Atlantic's CityLab, which took a deep dive into the study.
According to the study, people who have the personality trait of openness to experience cluster together the most, and they do so around the center of London. This personality trait is often associated with creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. Since extroverts thrive off of the energy of others, it's not surprising that they would also gather 'round city centers. The personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness cluster more on the outskirts of the city in suburban areas.
As far as life satisfaction is concerned, those in wealthier neighborhoods tend to be happier than those in less well-off areas. There wasn't much of a connection between some personality types (emotional stability and extroversion) and life satisfaction in some neighborhoods, but the study also found that people who live in areas with lower life satisfaction overall tend to be agreeable or conscientious. Those who are "open to experience" tend to be happier when they live in densely populated, ethnically diverse neighborhoods because being around people with similar levels of openness makes them happier.
Of course, there are some problems with this study. As The British Psychological Society's Research Digest points out, it's unclear from this study whether or not our personalities influence where we move or if where we move influences our personalities. However, the study does give us new insight into the fact that psychology plays a bigger role in forming our neighborhoods than we may have previously thought.
