Extraversion and Introversion - Regional Variation

Regional Variation

Some claim that Americans live in an "extraverted society" that rewards extravert behavior and rejects introversion. This is because the US is currently a culture of personality, whereas other cultures are cultures of character where people are valued for their "inner selves and their moral rectitude". Other cultures, such as Central Europe, Japan or regions where Buddhism, Sufism etc. prevail, prize introversion. These cultural differences predict individuals' happiness such that people who score higher in extraversion are happier, on average, in particularly extroverted cultures and vice versa.

Researchers have found that people who live on islands tend to be less extroverted (more introverted) than those living on the mainland, and that people whose ancestors had inhabited the island for twenty generations tend to be less extroverted than more recent arrivals. Furthermore, people who emigrate from islands to the mainland tend to be more extroverted than people that stay on islands, and those that immigrate to islands.

In the United States, researchers have found that people living in the midwestern states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois score higher than the U.S. average on extraversion. Utah and the southeastern states of Florida and Georgia also score high on this personality trait. The most introverted states in the United States are Maryland, New Hampshire, Alaska, Washington, Oregon and Vermont. People who live in the northwestern states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming are also relatively introverted.