Master Thesis: The Personality of German Places

Background
In his 2010 book „Who’s your city“, Richard Florida, one of the world’s leading urbanists, proposed the hypothesis that cities and regions adopt collective personalities. He tests this hypothesis by analyzing 350,000 individual personality profiles across the United States together with his team. More specifically, they investigated whether the „Big Five“ fundamental personality dimensions accumulate in certain regions of the United States. In this respect, they revealed, for example, that open-minded people are most likely to live in large urban areas. They tend to cluster in certain regions that offer new and exciting experiences. Conversely, conscientious and agreeable types, who are less adventurous and more attached to traditional relationships, are more likely to spread out near their established locations. These are just two of the exciting insights that Florida et al. have gained from studying geographic personality patterns. The present thesis will replicate and eventually extend Florida et al.’s findings by studying personality profiles across Germany.

Goals

• Systematically searching and contacting psychology researchers across Germany to acquire personality profile data in Germany.
• Pre-processing, analyzing, and visualizing the data with the aim to identify geographical patterns.

Profile

• Reliable and self-driven
• Interest in Psychology / Urbanism / Data Science
• Coding savvy (the second part of the thesis involves working with the data in R or Python)

Interested?
If you are interested, please send your application with a short motivational statement, your current grade sheet, CV, and possible starting date to
Prof. Dr. Isabell M. Isabell Welpe (welpe@tum.de).

Further Reading

• Florida, R. (2010). Who’s your city?: How the creative economy is making where to live the most important decision of your life. Vintage Canada.
• Rentfrow, P. J., Gosling, S. D., Jokela, M., Stillwell, D. J., Kosinski, M., & Potter, J. (2013). Divided we stand: Three psychological regions of the United States and their political, economic, social, and health correlates. Journal of personality and social psychology, 105(6), 996.
• Rentfrow, P. J., Mellander, C., & Florida, R. (2009). Happy states of America: A state-level analysis of psychological, economic, and social well-being. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(6), 1073-1082.