Peter J Rentfrow

University of Cambridge | Cam · Department of Psychology

Objective: Personality traits cluster across countries, regions, cities, and neighborhoods. What drives the formation of these clusters? Ecological theory suggests that physical locations shape humans' patterns of behaviors and psychological characteristics. Based on this theory, we examined whether and how differential land-usage relates to indiv...

Since Trump was elected U.S. President in 2016, researchers have sought to explain his support, with some focusing on structural factors (e.g., economics) and others focusing on psychological factors (e.g., negative emotions). We integrate these perspectives in a regional analysis of 18+ structural variables capturing economic, demographic, and hea...

Uchiyama et al. present a dual inheritance framework for conceptualizing how behavioural genetics and cultural evolution interact and affect heritability. We posit that to achieve a holistic and nuanced representation of the cultural environment and evolution against which genetic effects should be evaluated, it is imperative to consider the multip...

Objective: This research investigates how economic inequality shapes basic human values across three cross-national, cross-regional, and longitudinal studies (Ntotal = 219,697). Methods: Study 1 examined the relationship between objective economic inequality and values across 77 societies from all five continents (n = 170,525). Study 2 examined...

Are there universal patterns in musical preferences? To address this question, we built on theory and research in personality, cultural, and music psychology to map the terrain of preferences for Western music using data from 356,649 people across six continents. In Study 1 (N = 284,935), participants in 53 countries completed a genre favorability...

Levels of fertility and the shape of the age-specific fertility schedule vary substantially across U.S. regions with some states having peak fertility relatively early and others relatively late. Structural institutions or economic factors partly explain these heterogeneous patterns, but regional differences in personality might also contribute to...

Significance According to a fundamental assumption in the social sciences, the burden of lower socioeconomic status (SES) is more severe in developing nations. In contrast to this assumption, recent research has shown that the burden of lower SES is less—not more—severe in developing nations. In three large-scale global data sets, we show that nati...

Mountains—mythic and majestic—have fueled widespread speculation about their effects on character. Emerging empirical evidence has begun to show that physical topography is indeed associated with personality traits, especially heightened openness. Here, we extend this work to the domain of personal values, linking novel large-scale individual value...

Person-culture fit perspectives posit that individuals have higher self-esteem when their values match the values of the sociocultural environment in which they live. The current study tested this hypothesis by examining the associations between value congruence and self-esteem in a large-scale sample in the United States (N = 48,563). Multilevel r...

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by evoking social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were conducted almost exclusively...

Across 195 countries, rates of depressive disorders in women and men are higher among islanders (relative to mainlanders) at more northern locations in the Northern Hemisphere and at more southern locations in the Southern Hemisphere. Our explanatory analyses show that the three-way interaction of greater daylength variability, being more of an isl...

Regional differences in personality are associated with a range of consequential outcomes. But which factors are responsible for these differences? Frontier settlement theory suggests that physical topography is a crucial factor shaping the psychological landscape of regions. Hence, we investigated whether topography is associated with regional var...

How relevant are the Big Five in predicting religiosity? Existing evidence suggests that the Big Five domains account for only a small amount of variance in religiosity. Some researchers have claimed that the Big Five domains are too broad and not sufficiently specific to explain much religiosity variance. Accordingly, they speculated that the more...

People enjoy well-being benefits if their personal characteristics match those of their culture. This person-culture match effect is integral to many psychological theories and-as a driver of migration-carries much societal relevance. But do people differ in the degree to which person-culture match confers well-being benefits? In the first-ever emp...

We explore how variation in fatal automobile crashes across small geographic areas is associated with geographic variation in self-rated psychological and behavioral characteristics. Specifically, estimates of ZIP-code-level automobile fatality rates were linked to a separate dataset comprising 2.8 million responses to a widely used self-report per...

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and mainly human phenomenon. The persistence of this behavior throughout adulthood has fascinated and puzzled many researchers. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue that binds individuals together and triggers social support intentions. Initi...

There is ample evidence that watching sports induces strong emotions that translate into manifold consequential behaviours. However, it is rather ill-understood how exactly spectators’ emotions unfold during soccer matches and what determines their intensity. To address these questions, we used the 2018 FIFA World Cup as a natural quasi-experiment...

Objective: Lifespan perspectives on personality development have gained much momentum in recent years, mostly focusing on benevolent and neutral traits such as the Big Five. Despite their strong associations with critical personal outcomes, surprisingly little research has investigated the development of malevolent traits. Addressing this gap, we...

Cognitive flexibility is operationalized in the neuropsychological literature as the ability to shift between modes of thinking and adapt to novel or changing environments. Religious belief systems consist of strict rules and rituals that offer adherents certainty, consistency, and stability. Consequently, we hypothesized that religious adherence a...

Musical preferences are a fundamental individual difference predicting a multitude of listening behaviors. For decades, researchers have investigated how musical preferences are organized but have been hindered by genre-based and self-report methodologies. Recently, researchers have begun to investigate musical preferences at the feature-level usin...

Geographical psychology is an area of research aimed at mapping the spatial organization of psychological phenomena, identifying the mechanisms responsible for their organization, and understanding how individual characteristics, social entities, and physical features of the environment contribute to their organization. Investigations of geographic...

Die geographische Psychologie befasst sich unter anderem mit Persönlichkeitsunterschieden von Regionen und Regionstypen, in denen Personen leben und handeln. Mittels solcher Forschung können regionale „Mentalitäten“ untersucht werden aus denen sich Forschungsfragen zu Entwicklungspfaden von Regionen und deren Populationen ableiten lassen. Während e...

Sociability as a disposition describes a tendency to affiliate with others (vs. be alone). Yet, we know relatively little about how much social behavior people engage in during a typical day. One challenge to documenting social behavior tendencies is the broad number of channels over which socializing can occur, both in-person and through digital m...

Considerable attention has been paid to America’s political and economic divides. These divides revolve around class and location, with more affluent, more educated and denser places leaning more open-minded and liberal and less affluent, less educated and less dense places leaning more conservative. We contend that such divides are also reflected...

Recent research has identified regional variation of personality traits within countries but we know little about the underlying drivers of this variation. We propose that the Industrial Revolution, as a key era in the history of industrialized nations, has led to a persistent clustering of well-being outcomes and personality traits associated with...

Recent research has identified regional variation of personality traits within countries but we know little about the underlying drivers of this variation. We propose that the Industrial Revolution, as a key era in the history of industrialized nations, has led to a persistent clustering of well-being outcomes and personality traits associated with...

Traumatic events increase the risk of depression, but there is also evidence that adversity can lead to posttraumatic growth, including increased compassion and prosocial behavior. To date there is no empirical research pinpointing childhood trauma to an increase in trait empathy in adulthood. Although somewhat counter-intuitive, this might be pred...

Two recent electoral results - Donald Trump’s election as US president and the UK’s Brexit vote - have re-ignited debate on the psychological factors underlying voting behavior. Both campaigns promoted themes of fear, lost pride, and loss aversion, which are relevant to the personality dimension of Neuroticism, a construct previously not associated...

This paper explores the measurement of individual music feature preference using human- and computer-rated music excerpts. In the first of two studies, we correlated human ratings of song excerpts with computer-extracted music features and found good accordance, as well as similar criterion validity with preference for musical styles (the MUSIC mod...

Significance Belief in rigid distinctions between the nationalistic ingroup and outgroup has been a motivating force in citizens’ voting behavior, as evident in the United Kingdom’s 2016 EU referendum. We found that individuals with strongly nationalistic attitudes tend to process information in a more categorical manner, even when tested on neutra...

Nationalistic identities often play an influential role in citizens’ voting behaviour and political engagement. Nationalistic ideologies tend to have firm categories and rules for what belongs to and represents the national culture. In a sample of 332 UK citizens, we tested whether strict categorization of stimuli and rules in objective cognitive t...

The present study extended traditional nation-based research on person-culture-fit to the regional level. First, we examined the geographical distribution of Big Five personality traits in Switzerland. Across the 26 Swiss cantons, unique patterns were observed for all traits. For Extraversion and Neuroticism clear language divides emerged between t...

Two recent electoral results—Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president and the UK’s Brexit vote—have reignited debate on the psychological factors underlying voting behavior. Both campaigns promoted themes of fear, lost pride, and loss aversion, which are relevant to the personality dimension of neuroticism, a construct previously not associated wi...

This article adds a psychological perspective to help explain the regional Brexit vote. Based on an extensive dataset with personality traits, combined with socioeconomic data, our findings suggest that the regional clustering of these personality traits contribute to an understanding of the regional dispersion of the Brexit vote. We find evidence...

Zusammenfassung Neuere Forschungen brachten deutliche Hinweise auf regional unterschiedliche Ausprägungen bestimmter Persönlichkeitsmerkmale in der Bevölkerung. Solche regionalen Unterschiede bei prägenden Verhaltenseigenschaften einer Bevölkerung können wesentlich zur Erklärung einer regionalen Entwicklung beitragen. Wir geben einen Überblick über...

There is an unprecedented opportunity for psychologists and behavioral scientists to merge prior theory and research with big data to develop profound insights into the way people use and are affected by music. There are now streaming services that store data from millions of people on their day-to-day musical listening habits; song-level data that...

Human personality traits differ across geographical regions ¹⁻⁵. However, it remains unclear what generates these geographical personality differences. Because humans constantly experience and react to ambient temperature, we propose that temperature is a crucial environmental factor that is associated with individuals' habitual behavioural pattern...

Human behavior is the focus of many studies in the social, health, and behavioral sciences. Yet, few studies use behavioral observation methods to collect objective measures of behavior as it occurs in daily life, out in the real world — presumably the context of ultimate interest. Here, we provide a review of recent studies focused on measuring hu...

Human behavior is the focus of many studies in the social, health, and behavioral sciences. Yet, few studies use behavioral observation methods to collect objective measures of behavior as it occurs in daily life, out in the real world — presumably the context of ultimate interest. Here, we provide a review of recent studies focused on measuring hu...

This paper showcases an approach to combining smart-phone sensing technology, web mapping services, and psychological assessments to enhance our understanding of the psychological characteristics of places. For two weeks, twenty-six students used a smartphone app that passively collected GPS sensor data. Human raters then characterized their most f...

User interaction patterns with mobile apps and notifications are generally complex due to the many factors involved. However a deep understanding of what influences them can lead to more acceptable applications that are able to deliver information at the right time. In this paper, we present for the first time an in-depth analysis of interaction be...

Are religious people psychologically better or worse adjusted than their nonreligious counterparts? Hundreds of studies have reported a positive relation between religiosity and psychological adjustment. Recently, however, a comparatively small number of cross-cultural studies has questioned this staple of religiosity research. The latter studies f...

There is an unprecedented opportunity for psychologists and behavioral scientists to merge prior theory and research with big data to develop profound insights into the way people use and are affected by music. There are now streaming services that store data from millions of people on their day-to-day musical listening habits; song-level data that...

Self-tracking consists of recording the behaviors that occur in one’s daily life. Self-tracking studies can provide researchers with passively sensed information about individual’s daily behaviors and environments and actively logged information (e.g., self-reports). This method has great promise for obtaining detailed records of behavior in natura...

A widespread stereotype holds that the Germans are notorious worriers, an idea captured by the term, German Angst. An analysis of country-level neurotic personality traits (Trait Anxiety, Trait Depression, and Trait Neuroticism; N = 7,210,276) across 109 countries provided mixed support for this idea; Germany ranked 20th, 31st, and 53rd for Depress...

Measuring mental well-being with mobile sensing has been an increasingly active research topic. Pervasiveness of smartphones combined with the convenience of mobile app distribution platforms (e.g., Google Play) provide a tremendous opportunity to reach out to millions of users. However, the studies at the confluence of mental health and mobile sen...

Measuring mental well-being with mobile sensing has been an increasingly active research topic. Pervasiveness of smartphones combined with the convenience of mobile app distribution platforms (e.g., Google Play) provide a tremendous opportunity to reach out to millions of users. However, the studies at the confluence of mental health and mobile sen...

An extensive literature has emerged in regional studies linking organization-based measures of entrepreneurship (e.g., self-employment, new start-ups) to regional economic performance. A limitation of the extant literature is that the measurement of entrepreneurship is not able to incorporate broader conceptual views, such as behavior, of what actu...

Research exploring God representations has tended to assume that these constructs are unitary in nature. However, a considerable research literature has illustrated ways in which people's representations of self and others are complex. Given that Christians believe in 1 God but also the 3 distinct members of the Trinity, the present research used t...

Physical activity, both exercise and non-exercise, has far-reaching benefits to physical health. Although exercise has also been linked to psychological health (e.g., happiness), little research has examined physical activity more broadly, taking into account non-exercise activity as well as exercise. We examined the relationship between physical a...

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There is geographical variation in the ways in which people think, feel, and behave. How are we to understand the causes and consequences of such variation? Geographical psychology is an emerging subarea of research concerned with the spatial organization of psychological phenomena and how individual characteristics, social entities, and physical f...

Research and theorizing on gender and age differences in self-esteem have played a prominent role in psychology over the past 20 years. However, virtually all empirical research has been undertaken in the United States or other Western industrialized countries, providing a narrow empirical base from which to draw conclusions and develop theory. To...

Are religious people psychologically better or worse adjusted than their nonreligious counterparts? Hundreds of studies have reported a positive relation between religiosity and psychological adjustment. Recently, however, a comparatively small number of cross-cultural studies has questioned this staple of religiosity research. The latter studies f...

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Does personality predict how people feel in different types of situations? The present research addressed this question using data from several thousand individuals who used a mood tracking smartphone application for several weeks. Results from our analyses indicated that people’s momentary affect was linked to their location, and provided prelimin...

Research suggests that musical preferences are linked to personality, but this research has been hindered by genre-based theories and methods. We address this limitation using a novel method based on the actual attributes that people perceive from music. In Study 1, using 102 musical pieces representing 26 genres and subgenres, we show that 38 perc...

Are religious people psychologically better or worse adjusted than their non-religious counterparts? Hundreds of studies have reported a positive relation between religiosity and psychological adjustment. Recently, however, a comparatively small number of cross-cultural studies has questioned this staple of religiosity research. The latter studies...

Do macropsychological factors predict “hard” economic outcomes like regional economic resilience? Prior approaches to understanding economic resilience have focused on regional economic infrastructure. In contrast, we draw on research highlighting the key role played by psychological factors in economic behaviors. Using large psychological data set...

Does it matter if your personality fits in with the personalities of the people where you live? The present study explored the links between person-city personality fit and self-esteem. Using data from 543,934 residents of 860 U.S. cities, we examined the extent to which the fit between individuals' Big Five personality traits and the Big Five trai...

Physical activity, both exercise and non-exercise, has far-reaching benefits to physical health. Although exercise has also been linked to psychological health (e.g., happiness), little research has examined physical activity more broadly, taking into account non-exercise activity as well as exercise. We examined the relationship between physical a...

Research and theorizing on gender and age differences in self-esteem have played a prominent role in psychology over the past 20 years. However, virtually all empirical research has been undertaken in the United States or other Western industrialized countries, providing a narrow empirical base from which to draw conclusions and develop theory. To...

Preterm birth (<37 weeks' gestation) is sometimes associated with poorer outcomes in adulthood (e.g., poorer health, fewer intimate relationships, and lower income). However, few studies have examined how these adults felt about their lives or how personality affected these associations. 11,592 preterm and 51,460 full term adults completed online s...