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Beach or mountains? The choice may reveal your personality





Look at the two photographs: would you choose the beach or the mountains for a vacation? Psychologists believe the choice reveals your personality.

Past research showed that extroverts need ‘affiliation’ – i.e. being with and talking to people – and ‘exhibition’ – i.e. getting attention from and entertaining people. Introverts need less affiliation and exhibition. Extroverts like people bustling around. Introverts function better in specific office spaces with fewer visual and audio distractions.

Most of the previous research focused on social situations rather than physical surroundings. Psychologists at the University of Virginia said that no study had looked at extroversion and introversion in connection with natural environments. Hence they conducted a series of five experiments.

The university psychologists found that extroverts and introverts preferred different landscapes for their vacations. Extroverts preferred wide-open spaces, including the beach, while introverts preferred the woods, forests, and mountains. The majority of people choose a photograph of the beach.

Researchers think that woods and mountains are great places for solitude and self-reflection, which suits introverts, and beaches offer interactions with more people, which suits extroverts.

In another experiment, researchers analyzed a database of 613,000 people across America to see whether extroversion and introversion were associated with different American states. Researchers found that residents in mountainous US states were more introverted than residents in flat states.

Does living in the mountains make people more introverted or do introverts gravitate towards mountainous regions? Researchers did another experiment. They sent groups of students into flat open areas or forested secluded areas on the University campus and analyzed their feelings of extroversion or introversion.

Researchers found that the terrain resulted in different levels of happiness for extroverts and introverts. Introverts were more stressed in open spaces than when they were surrounded by trees. But overall geography does not change personality. This last experiment was a short study so the researchers would like to conduct more research on the effects of geography on extroverts and introverts.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/06/what-your-vacation-choices-say-about-your-personality/

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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