The Psychology of the States

There's a great interactive mapping of the psychological states of the states of America, in the WSJ.

the conscientious Floridian? The neurotic Kentuckian?

You bet - at least, according to new research on the geography of personality. Based on more than 600,000 questionnaires and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the study maps regional clusters of personality traits, then overlays state-by-state data on crime, health and economic development in search of correlations.

Politics and Place

Because representative democracy is based on geography, content created by citizens must be identified by place instead of simply organized by issue. Content, from a news story to an online comment to a picture or video, needs to automatically be assigned (or “tagged”) with a geographic place. In addition, content bounded by a state or region or identified as global will be essential.

Sidewalks for Democracy Online

by Steven L. Clift

Download the PDF