Criteria like housing prices, population density, and crime rates are often emphasized when people consider the desirability of living in an urban area. These "livability" factors are associated with higher life satisfaction, both directly (by making the lives of residents better) and indirectly (because more affluent and satisfied people live in these neighborhoods).

However, according to a recent PNAS paper, these livability factors can only account for two-thirds of the difference in life satisfaction, with a large portion of the difference being attributed to something more surprising: a match between personality and neighborhood. In London, personality traits cluster in different neighborhoods and contribute to the life satisfaction of the residents there.

Standard livability rankings “tend to imply that all people would value the same residential areas equally,” write the authors of the paper. This doesn’t take into account that life satisfaction seems to depend partially on being well matched with a neighborhood, they argue. The researchers suggest that certain personalities may be more likely to flourish in certain circumstances than others, meaning that different urban characteristics will suit different types of people. “For example, a location with high cultural diversity might enhance the lives of residents who are eager to explore new customs and cuisines, but increase the anxiety and discomfort of residents who prefer to live by their own social traditions,” they suggest.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers used data from 56,000 individuals living in London, a portion of the results collected by the BBC’s Big Personality Test, which surveyed psychological characters, demographic factors, and residential information based on postal district. The researchers then used this data to establish which areas of London had the highest and lowest ratings of life satisfaction and certain personality traits: extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience.

The results showed that different traits were associated with different neighborhoods. Central London was characterized by high openness to experience but low conscientiousness, while high levels of extraversion and emotional stability were associated with the southwest boroughs. Some of these personality traits were matched with particular urban characteristics: high openness to experience was found in neighborhoods with low income and employment rates, while neighborhoods with high income also had higher life satisfaction.

Having established which areas were associated with which personality and urban traits, the researchers explored what combinations of these characteristics resulted in a change in life satisfaction.

Emotional stability and extraversion have previously been linked to life satisfaction, and the authors found this held true regardless of what kind of neighborhood one was in. However, some personality traits only contributed to life satisfaction in specific environments. People with more openness to experience had higher life satisfaction in neighborhoods with high population density, high house pricing, more cultural diversity, lower income, and lower employment. It's possible that people with high openness to experience may be more likely to be happy in vibrant, diverse neighborhoods, suggest the authors.

Meanwhile, in neighborhoods where people generally had lower life satisfaction, those individuals with higher agreeableness and higher conscientiousness had better than average life satisfaction. This could be because agreeableness and conscientiousness make more a difference to people living in difficult economic or social circumstances than to those living in relative affluence.

The fact that the study used much smaller geographical regions than previous studies, focusing on neighborhoods rather than states or counties, is a strength, write the researchers, but there are still gaps that need to be filled by future research. For instance, it wasn’t possible to separate how much of the personality traits of each neighborhood was due to people with those traits moving in there and how much can be explained by people being socialized in a certain way by where they happen to live. It will also be necessary to see whether these results can be generalized to other cities and countries.

PNAS, 2015. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1415800112 (About DOIs).