Happy faces, happy places
I have Libby Purves in the Times today to thank for putting me on to the research of Dr Jason Rentfrow. Working initially in the US (with Dr Sam Gosling from Texas), and now in the UK, Dr Rentfrow claims to show that there is a geographical basis to personality type.
Certain personality characteristics are clustered in certain regions with, for example, people from the South East being outgoing and creative but not very agreeable.
Dr Rentfrow suggest his findings could reflect three processes:
• Selective migration – we move to places that match our personality
• Emotional contagion – moods and attitudes transfer from one person to another
• Environments – certain places contribute to moods (for example, the long dark winters of Scandinavia contribute to a more depressive personality type while the long warm evenings of the southern Mediterranean makes for a more sociable type)
The second thesis is reinforced by the Framingham Heart Study, a uniquely detailed longitudinal study of the residents of a town in Massachusetts. A new analysis of the data shows that happiness is catching. The happiness of others influences our happiness, with a significant effect being found up to three degrees of separation.
Renfrew’s findings are fascinating, and as Libby suggests, provide the basis for legitimising loads of stereotypes. The hard question is whether we can draw any implications for policy. There are many reasons to think not. How well do we understand these effects? Do policy analysts have the capacity, or the policy makers the right, to interfere in naturally occurring patterns?
Having said which, I have argued in the past that, as public service face a squeeze, we need to look for a social multiplier effect from public spending. If happiness – and other socially benign personality traits – spread, then discovering and applying ways of enhancing them would start to look like a very good investment. It might, also, for example, strengthen the case for incentivising more positive and resourceful people from deprived communities to stay in those communities for longer.
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Comments
4 Comments on Happy faces, happy places
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Tessy Britton on
Mon, 20th Apr 2009 4:40 pm
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matthewtaylor on
Mon, 20th Apr 2009 4:47 pm
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carl allen on
Mon, 20th Apr 2009 5:40 pm
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Matthew Kalman on
Thu, 23rd Apr 2009 2:47 pm
This is really interesting – nice to see some UK research on this. Richard Florida published a lot of research about clustering in the US – initially of the ‘creative classes’ http://www.creativeclass.com/richard_florida/books/ But he also published a lot of maps which showed where types of people lived, including neurotic, conscientious and agreeable people….. http://thrivingtoo.typepad.com/thriving_too/2008/05/social-psycholo.html
I can’t help but think that publishing these maps would cause migration towards more creative or agreeable places?
The most stunning statistic from the Framingham Study was that our own happiness is increased by 9% for each additional happy friend we have.
http://thrivingtoo.typepad.com/thriving_too/2009/01/happiness-in-social-networks.html
If I had some money to spend (sadly missed out on your £5 to read your post last week!) I would help communities get connected.
Thanks Tessy. I think Florida’a work draws on Rentfrow’s
The main reason many positive and resourceful people have no choice but to move out of their community is that there is no physical place for a nice house and garden for them to live in when they become adults.
The physical place has to exist as the incentive and the matter is then who chooses to stay and who chooses to leave.
I point out that such people like what they have done in their neighbourhood and many need no other incentive but the physical place to stay in the meighbourhood. This changes the argument from getting people to stay longer to one of additional resources to those who stay and have proved their worth.
The hidden gold in Dr Rentfrow’s research might be his mapping of the ‘Openness’ dimension of the ‘Big 5′ (aka OCEAN) traits – which for some reason he’s renamed ‘Intellect’ (though I’ve not seen any detailed paper where he might have done this).
It is this openness dimension that quite strongly correlates with Jane Loevinger’s stages of adult maturation – the other four dimensions don’t correlate (ie like being left-handed, the other 4 dimensions don’t change as we grow older. Nor do they tell us very much about our level of capabilities and competencies).
But the dimension of adult maturation (or growth in cognitive complexity) tells us an awful lot about our capabilities – for instance, it tells us which leaders are most likely to be able to positively transform their organisations (or countries, perhaps?).
It was this dimension of maturation in cognitive complexity that was found to be so important in a long OECD project on the competencies needed in the 21st century.
This project underpins OECD work on education/competencies for the digital age, I believe (that’s what the psychologist Helen Haste, a UK advisor on this project, says).
The professions are often (without usually being fully aware of it) demanding that we must all today have cognitive complexity up to a ’self-authoring’ or perhaps even ’self-transforming’ level if we are to thrive in the digital age.
But most of us are way below those levels.
Where are these gaps – between the need, and the reality – the biggest (worst)?
How might lifelong learning reduce these gaps?
At last we might be able to see these gaps
The OECD even talked about plans for household-level assessment of cognitive complexity. I think it was the Canadian Chief Statistician who planned this – but I was unable to find out it it went ahead. I suspect not.
But it sounds like Rentfrow has been up to something similar, without realising it…
Will someone tell the OECD, I’m not sure they’ll listen to me 
As Prof Robert Kegan put it one paper for that OECD project on key competencies:
” more than half of even advantaged adults may not yet possess the level
of mental complexity that would equip them to enact successfully the competen-
cies we suggest are necessary for adults in the 21 st century.”
But we might bridge this gap, if we rework the foundations of education with awareness of this gap:
“The gap between the mental demands implicit in our suggested competencies and the mental capacities of the “student” actually provides a heretofore missing intellectual foundation for the purposes of adult or lifelong education that is as strong as the foundation which exists for the education of the young – namely, education not merely for the acquisition of skills or an increase in one’s fund of knowledge, but education for development, education for transformation.”
Matthew Kalman
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