Does a Small Country Have Meaningful Regional Personality Differences? The Case of Estonia

Regional differences in the Big Five personality domains have been observed in several countries at different geographical granularities, often correlating with regional political, economic, social, and health (PESH) indicators.

We examined the extent of regional personality differences in Estonia and whether these differences were meaningfully correlated with PESH indicators.

Using data from the Estonian Biobank (N = 72,268; 7% of the adult population, providing unprecedented representativeness), we tested regional personality differences and their relations with PESH indicators with and without spatial smoothing.

We found that regional Big Five scores varied by 1.19 (extraversion) to 2.78 (openness) T-score units across counties (N = 15) and by 2.80 (extraversion) to 4.74 (openness) units across municipalities (n = 74). Also, the correlations with the PESH indicators at the county and municipality levels persisted even after controlling for gender, age, and spatial dependency, and were moderately consistent with our predictions (r = 0.23 to 0.30) and between the county and municipality levels (r = 0.41).

Estonian residents tended to be similar in personality traits regardless of their location, replicating results from other countries. Yet, small regional personality domain differences could represent valid and possibly consequential psychological variation.