From a column in the ever-awesome Ideas Section of the Boston Globe. Written by Richard Florida, the dude that thinks creative types are the engine of any fast-growing economy:

Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. And each of these dimensions has been found to affect key life outcomes from life expectancy and divorce to political ideology, job choices and performance, and innovation and creativity.

What’s more, it turns out these personality types are not spread evenly across the country. They cluster. And how they cluster tells us much: What city someone might want to move to, the broader character of regions, and even the creative and economic futures of broad swaths of the nation.

Here’s the maps:

Interestingly, the maps basically conform to regional stereotypes: Southerners are polite, the coastal people are generally open minded to new stuff, the north easterners are neurotic and self absorbed, and the extroverts that will wear a thong bikini to a sit-down dinner live in Miami.