There is something comforting about staying close to home. You know the roads without checking Google Maps, recognise familiar faces at the neighbourhood shop, and can probably predict what your favourite restaurant will serve before opening the menu. For some people, home is an anchor; for others, it is a place to return to after years of exploring the world.But could staying in the state where you grew up be linked to something unexpected about your personality?A study involving 3,958 American adults found that people who still live in their childhood state score slightly higher on psychopathy than those who have moved elsewhere.Before anyone starts eyeing their neighbour who has never moved away, however, there is an important caveat: the difference is extremely small, and it certainly does not mean that people who stay put are psychopaths.
What the researchers discovered
In the study, titled ‘There’s No Place Like Home: Stayers Are More Psychopathic Than Movers‘, researchers examined survey data from 3,958 American adults. Participants were divided into two groups: those still living in the state where they grew up and those currently living in a different state. While the former are described as stayers, the latter are described as movers. The researchers compared their scores on three personality traits commonly grouped together as the Dark Triad: psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism.The results were interesting. After accounting for factors including age, sex, race, birth cohort and the states people came from and lived in, stayers continued to score slightly higher on psychopathy. Though the difference was not very significant.Narcissism and Machiavellianism, meanwhile, showed no statistically significant differences between the two groups after adjustments.
(Image Credit: canva)
While the word psychopathy tends to evoke images of fictional villains, cold-blooded criminals and people who seem incapable of feeling anything for anyone else. Psychology uses the term more carefully. For the sake of this study, psychopathic traits can include reduced empathy, emotional callousness, impulsivity and a tendency to disregard other people’s feelings.
Why might some people stay while others leave?
Moving to another state is rarely as simple as choosing a destination on a map. The process is more complex involving finding a job and leaving family behind. Moving away from home means undertaking a number of legal decisions as well, such as leasing a house.The research observes that people with stronger psychopathic traits might find fewer opportunities to move. This is because these traits make it difficult for them to maintain relationships and trust people.On the other hand, people who choose to stay at home are already familiar with their surroundings. This familiarity can bring security and belonging, but it may also create circumstances in which certain self-serving behaviours are easier to sustain.
(Image Credit: canva)
These are possible explanations, not established facts. The study did not demonstrate that psychopathic traits prevent people from moving, or that staying in one place causes those traits to develop. It simply found an association between living in one’s childhood state and slightly higher psychopathy scores.
The surprising twist: where movers end up
The researchers also examined the destinations of people who had moved away from their childhood state. They found that movers with higher scores on the test tended to relocate to more densely populated states than people with lower scores on those traits.Among movers, higher psychopathy scores were also associated with destinations that had higher homicide rates and greater income inequality.But the evidence does not establish that people deliberately choose destinations because those places match their personalities. Nor does it mean that residents of densely populated states, or states with higher homicide rates, are more psychopathic. These were small associations involving individual personality scores and broad state-level characteristics.As the researchers acknowledge, the data cannot tell us whether personality influenced people’s destination choices or whether living in those places affected their personalities.
Does moving away change who we are?
The findings also raise an interesting question about how we interpret mobility itself. Earlier research had linked residential mobility and a willingness to embrace a mobile lifestyle with higher scores on Dark Triad traits. The new study appears to point in the opposite direction: people who had left their childhood state scored slightly lower on psychopathy than those who stayed.One explanation is that moving frequently within a local area and making a major interstate move are not necessarily the same experience. Someone who changes homes repeatedly may be navigating unstable relationships or circumstances, while someone who crosses state lines might be responding to a job offer, family commitments or the promise of a better life.The distinction matters. A person can move house many times without ever leaving their home state, while another can move across the country once and settle down for decades.The researchers’ findings suggest that the reasons behind mobility may be just as important as the movement itself. However, further research is needed to understand exactly how these patterns develop.
