Search

Some scholars have presented models of the United States as a set of "nations" with distinct settlement histories and contemporary cultures. We examined personality differences in one such model, that of Colin Woodard, using data from over 75,000 respondents. Four nations were particularly distinct: The Deep South, Left Coast, New Netherland, and the Spanish Caribbean. Differences between nations at the level of the individual person were typically small, but were larger at the level of community, revealing how aggregation can contribute to differences in the lived experience of places in nations such as Yankeedom or Greater Appalachia. We represented effects in a three-dimensional model defined by Authoritarian conventionalism (which differentiated 'Red' and 'Blue' nations) as well as Cognitive resilience and Competitiveness (which differentiated among the Blue nations). Finally, we adjusted Woodard's model to better fit the data, and found that nations largely maintained their boundaries, with the most drastic changes occurring on the East Coast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Openness to experience is consistently associated with tolerance. We suggest that tests of the association between openness to experience and tolerance have heretofore been incomplete because they have primarily focused on prejudice toward unconventional target groups. We test (a) the individual difference perspective, which predicts that because people who are high in openness are more open to diverse and dissimilar people and ideas, they will express more tolerance than people who are low in openness and (b) the worldview conflict perspective, which predicts that people high and low in openness will both be intolerant toward those with different worldviews. Four studies, using both conventional and unconventional target groups, find support for an integrative perspective. People high in openness do appear more tolerant of diverse worldviews compared with people low in openness; however, at the same time, people both high and low in openness are more intolerant of groups whose worldviews conflict with their own. These findings highlight the need to consider how individual difference variables and features of the target groups may interact in important ways to influence the expression of prejudice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]