Tom Marcinko @ 15-09-2008
A new study says personality traits vary by region in the U.S (pdf). Here’s the map for niceness. Minnesota’s score does not surprise me (assuming there’s anything to this at all, of course). The study also maps openness, extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness (and it’s surprising to see my adopted state of Arizona scoring so high there). Color maps next time, please, professors. Actual marketing people need these.
[Tip: Andrew Sullivan; image: Rentfrow et al.]
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Paul Raven @ 25-08-2008
OK, hypothetical question - let’s say you could pick any personality trait to be chemically enhanced. Which aspects of your personality would be in the top three? [image by Tom Saint]
According to a recent study, you’re most likely to be willing to tweak the parts of your psyche that you don’t consider fundamental to to your identity as a person - your ability to concentrate, for example, or maybe the number of hours of sleep you need each night. [via FuturePundit]
Human enhancement drugs are still very much in their infancy at the moment; to draw an analogy, many people were pretty leery of plastic surgery when it was first becoming more commonplace. So I suspect that we’ll see the ‘early-adopter’ pattern with more drastic enhancements, with artists, outcasts and other pioneers of the psyche venturing out beyond mere ‘cosmetic’ cognitive enhancement… after all, think how useful it would be to become autistic for a week.
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Tom Marcinko @ 25-06-2008
“To have another language is to possess a second soul,” Charlemagne supposedly said, possibly in a Germanic dialect of the Franks. That certainly implies another personality, which is what researchers in the Journal of Consumer Research report observing in a study of bicultural, bilingual women.
…[W]omen classified themselves as more assertive when they spoke Spanish than when they spoke English. They also had significantly different perceptions of women in ads when the ads were in Spanish versus English. “In the Spanish-language sessions, informants perceived females as more self-sufficient and extroverted,” write the authors.
The researchers say the shift, which seems to occur unconsciously, could have implications for political and purchasing choices. Not to mention an interesting side-effect to a shrinking world.
[Image: jetheriot]
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