People often relocate, with 10% of Germans and 15% of Americans changing homes each year. Many factors influence these decisions, yet the impact of personality on our choice of residence is largely unknown. This oversight raises a crucial question: does personality predict where we choose to live? Answering this question has important psychological, economic, and societal implications. We combine large-scale archival data and experimental methods to understand how personality shapes our choice of residence.
Background
Our personality predicts the environments into which we select ourselves, for example, which situations, social relationships, or jobs we enter. However, people frequently change not only their situations, social relationships, or jobs but also their places of residence. Does our personality also predict the residential contexts into which we select ourselves?
Mission
Previous research has shown that individual and contextual factors jointly shape residential choice behaviors. We argue that personality traits at both, the individual and the geographical level, are an overlooked determinant of residential choice. Residential mobility — as an ubiquitous phenomenon of our societies — is widely studied in several social science disciplines. Our project seeks to demonstrate that personality may be more important for understanding residential choices than previously thought.
Research Approach
We combine large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal panel data to study actual relocation choices. In addition, we use experiments to identify the processes that drive personality effects in residential choice.
Funding
The project is funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation) with 231,589 €.
Research Team: The project is based at the Institute of Behavioral Science and Technology (IBT) at the University of St. Gallen and supported by our team and external collaborators.
Research Team
The project is based at the Institute of Behavioral Science and Technology (IBT) at the University of St. Gallen and supported by our team and external collaborators.
External collaborators
