From cowboy boots to baseball caps, it’s safe to say that conjuring up a mental picture of someone living in another part of America is as easy as, well, pie.
Turns out, there may be something to our imagined geographical “personalities” — whether they’re broken down by psychology, history, or the environment itself. And understanding the way we are sorted — and sort ourselves — could be key to understanding how we behave, both as a country and by ourselves.
Jason Rentfrow, who studies geographical psychology at the University of Cambridge, says he and his colleagues “have been working quite hard just to explore the nature of these differences." And they have yet to answer the big questions: What might account for these differences, and how consequential are they in people's lives?
Today, no one would dispute that different areas of the U.S. are defined by the differences in their ...
