A psychological atlas is a map that depicts national or regional variations in scores that represent a specific psychological trait or outcome.
Here’s a psychological atlas (from the World Happiness Report) that portrays levels of happiness around the world, as measured by Gallup polls in recent years.
Survey respondents indicated the quality of their life on a 10-point scale. On the map, countries colored light or dark green are happier nations. Countries colored orange or red are less happy nations.
It’s fun to look at psychological atlases. They present large amounts of information very quickly in a format that’s visually interesting and easily accessible to most readers. Unfortunately, these colorful maps often conceal as much as they reveal.
Three Drawbacks of Psychological Atlases
1. Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede and his colleagues have created six psychological atlases, each of which depicts global scores along a different cultural dimension such as individualism-collectivism. (Please look at the maps before reading further.)
The country colors and numbers on the first four maps are based on the opinions of IBM employees who were surveyed between 1967 and 1973. Hofstede’s atlases, which can be found in many textbooks and blog posts, are based primarily on data collected more than 50 years ago from nonrepresentative subsets of people living in each country. The maps would probably look different if they were redrawn today on the basis of survey response collected in recent years from more representative samples.
2. In 2008, personality researchers Peter Rentfrow, Sam Gosling, and Jeff Potter constructed five different maps of the United States. Each map depicts gradations among the 50 states in terms of their overall score on one of the Big Five personality traits. In the Agreeableness map, for example, the 10 most agreeable states are shaded black, the 10 least agreeable states are shaded white, and the remaining 30 states are depicted in lighter or darker shades of gray (Rentfrow, Gosling, & Potter, 2008).
The study by Rentfrow’s team is exemplary in that their maps are based on the personality test scores of more than 600,000 persons in the U.S. Their study was an important early step in constructing a geography of personality.
The maps, however, can be misleading. Someone viewing the Agreeableness map, for example, could easily conclude that the 10 states in the lowest group (the bottom 20%) are meaningfully different from the 10 states in the highest group (the top 20%). Maybe they are, but maybe they aren’t. It’s not possible to tell because of the way the maps are constructed.
Let me explain. Suppose we rank all 50 states in terms of their average score on a 5-point scale of extraversion. The most extraverted and least extraverted states may differ greatly, say 2 points on the 5-point scale. It’s also possible, however, that the highest-scoring state and lowest-scoring state are separated by a mere fraction of a point, with the other 48 states in-between.
The general lesson is this. Any set of items—individuals, countries, basketball teams, cars—can be ranked from highest to lowest along some scale, but the differences between items may be so small as to be psychologically meaningless.
3. Several years ago, Lazar Stankov and Jihyun Lee published a “psychological atlas of the world” based on data from 33 nations. They claimed to have identified three “psychological continents” that differ with respect to Conservatism, which they defined as a set of social attitudes related to nastiness, morality, and religiosity (Stankov & Lee, 2016).
In their map, the least conservative countries (Canada, Australia, and Western European nations) are colored blue. Moderately conservative countries (Eastern Europe, Russia, China, and the U.S.) are colored red. The most conservative countries (mostly in South Asia, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Arica, and Latin America) are colored yellow.
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You probably haven’t seen Stankov and Lee’s map, but I have. Trust me when I say it’s beautiful. But is it valid?
Each nation’s Conservatism score was calculated on the basis of self-reported attitudes of university students in that nation. In Argentina, for example, 441 students completed the online questionnaire. Hundreds of students were also recruited in Japan, the Philippines, and the United States. The national scores of Peru, Ireland, and the Netherlands, however, were based on 38, 33, and 30 respondents, respectively. The sample sizes in those three countries were much too small to be representative. As a result, it would be foolhardy to consider them “national” scores.
How to Think Carefully about Psychological Atlases
The researchers who produce these maps are usually aware of—and very open about—the limitations of their maps. Casual readers, however, may not be as savvy. When interpreting a psychological atlas, it’s important to ask yourself three questions.
First, what is the sample size for each nation or region? Is it sufficiently large? Second, are the samples representative of the nation or region as a whole? Third, are the numerical differences between high-scoring and low-scoring regions statistically significant and psychologically meaningful? In a close race, the distance between first place and last place could be miniscule.
