Wellbeing
Are people happier when their personality matches their region?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Swiss adults whose pattern of Big Five traits resembled their canton's typical profile reported higher wellbeing, but other ways of measuring 'fit' gave null or even opposite results.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Secondary analysis of Swiss Household Panel waves 11-17 (2009-2015): Big Five measured once, canton-level personality profiles aggregated, and three-level models (years within persons within cantons) predicting annual wellbeing from person-canton fit.
- N
- N=7767 · 7,767 adult panel members with Big Five data were used for mapping; multilevel models used a 2012 base year and excluded six cantons with fewer than 50 respondents, so model Ns are somewhat smaller (reported in tables not included in the text).
- Population
- Nationally representative adult residents of Switzerland (mean age 46.8) in the Swiss Household Panel.
- Outcome
- Life satisfaction, satisfaction with personal relationships, positive affect and negative affect (single 0-10 items), predicted by shape, elevation and scatter fit indices.
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Key findings
Personality varied by region, with a clear split for extraversion and neuroticism: French- and Italian-speaking cantons were higher in neuroticism and lower in extraversion than the German-speaking east. Shape similarity consistently predicted higher life satisfaction, relationship satisfaction and positive affect and lower negative affect, and this survived robustness checks. Elevation mostly had no effect, and scatter predicted better wellbeing, the opposite of what fit theory predicts. Only a tiny share of the variance in wellbeing (at most 1.97%) sat at the canton level.
Methodology
Using the Swiss Household Panel, the researchers averaged the Big Five personality scores of residents in each canton to build regional personality profiles and mapped them. They then computed how well each adult's own profile fitted their canton's in three ways: shape (correlation between profiles), elevation (difference in average level) and scatter (difference in variability). Multilevel models tested whether these fit indices predicted life satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, positive affect and negative affect across yearly panel waves.
Limitations
The data are correlational, so fit cannot be shown to cause wellbeing; people may also choose where to live. Personality was measured only once with a 10-item scale whose inter-item correlations were low (as low as 0.08 for agreeableness), and wellbeing was measured with single items. Cantons may be too coarse to capture people's actual local culture, residential moves were not modelled, and the authors' 'complementary fit' explanation for the scatter result is post hoc and preliminary.
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