 40. A Geographical Perspective on Personality Traits 829
that frontier regions (e.g., American West, 
Japanese North) were originally settled by 
people with traits associated with indepen -
dence and novelty seeking. The idea is that 
people with such traits are likely to seek out 
new and challenging experiences, and the 
rugged landscape and undeveloped nature 
of the frontier offered an opportunity to sat -
isfy those needs. Over time, the settlers had 
children, communities emerged, and norms 
and institutions were gradually established 
that effectively reinforced the psychological 
characteristics common to the founders. As 
a result, descendants and others who were 
socialized in frontier regions should display 
high levels of independence and novelty 
seeking. Consistent with this logic, results 
from the United States and Japan suggested 
that people who were born and raised in 
frontier regions display more independence, 
autonomy, and openness compared to resi -
dents of nonfrontier regions (Kitayama et 
al., 2006).
Psychological research concerned with the 
impact of the Industrial Revolution provides 
another example of how social influence, 
ecological influence, and selective migration 
may jointly contribute to geographical per -
sonality differences. Without question, the 
Industrial Revolution had tremendous eco -
nomic and social effects throughout much of 
the Western World, but its impact was felt 
perhaps most strongly in the coal regions of 
Britain, which provided both the physical 
labor and the fuel that powered the factories. 
But as technologies advanced, coal reserves 
diminished, and as other sources of fuel 
took over, the economic value of the coal re -
gions diminished, leaving large numbers of 
people in these regions without work. To un -
derstand the impact of those changes on the 
psychological health of people living in coal 
regions, Obschonka et al. (2018) investi -
gated the associations between the historical 
employment share in large-scale coal-based 
industries during the Industrial Revolution 
and current regional variation in personality 
and well-being. In line with expectations, the 
results indicated that the local dominance of 
large-scale coal-based industries predicted 
high levels of neuroticism, and low levels of 
well-being, and extraversion. Furthermore, 
the current psychological profiles of coal 
regions appear to be driven by a combina -tion of selective migration, whereby people 
with resilient profiles moved away from coal 
regions, and social influence, such that per -
sisting economic hardship in coal regions 
has restricted educational and professional 
opportunities.
In short, research suggests that social in -
fluence, ecological influence, and selective 
migration can all play a role in shaping the 
psychological landscapes of regions. And re -
search on frontier regions and the psycho -
logical effects of the Industrial Revolution 
provide illustrative examples of how these 
mechanisms may work together to bring 
about geographical differences. But are geo -
graphical differences in personality impor -
tant?
Are Geographical Differences in Personality 
Linked to  Consequential  Outcomes?
Decades of research in political science, 
economics, sociology, and epidemiology 
have revealed geographical variation in 
voting behavior, rates of unemployment, 
criminal behavior, and disease prevalence. 
Such population-  level indicators serve as 
important metrics of the collective health 
and well-being of groups of individuals and 
are used by governments, industries, and 
other institutions to make important deci -
sions that have implications for millions of 
people. We know a fair amount about the 
social, economic, and political factors that 
are associated with these types of popula -
tion metrics, but we know very little about 
how such metrics relate to psychological fac -
tors. This gap in our knowledge is puzzling, 
considering that many of the processes by 
which social, economic, and political fac -
tors become expressed in population met -
rics are likely to be psychological in nature. 
Indeed, it seems likely that the phenomena 
studied by psychologists (e.g., personality, 
identity, subjective well-being, prejudice) 
play a role in mediating the links between 
such predictive factors as ethnic diversity, 
socioeconomic status (SES), and education, 
and outcomes such as regional prosperity, 
voting patterns, and disease rates. Geo -
graphical psychology is well-  suited for fill -
ing this knowledge gap and informing our 
understanding of the ways in which psycho -