Geography, Psychology, and the ‘Big Five’ Personality Traits: Who moves, and over what distances, in the UK?

Personality, as measured by the ‘Big Five’ dimensions of agreeableness, openness, extroversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness, has been explored in the Social Psychological literature as a predictor of migration but so far has received very little attention in the geographical literature, which is surprising given its predictive importance and also evidence that the selectivity of migration shapes area personality profiles. Using the Understanding Society dataset, this paper analyses how personality influences whether a respondent moves or not over a five-year period and, if they do, how far they move. After controlling for individual socio-demographic characteristics, it is found (i) that those who score higher on Conscientiousness and Neuroticism are more likely to expect to move in the next year; (ii) that only those who score highly on extroversion actually made at least one move during the five-year period; (iii) that Openness is positively associated with making a long-distance move (=>50km), and (iv) that the pattern for (iii) is reversed for short-distance moves (