What's the personality of Chicago neighborhoods?

RedEye used new research from the University of Toronto to estimate tics of famous Chicagoans, based on neighborhoods they've been known to haunt.

Defining Chicago's neighborhood personality maps

Chicago Tribune
While Chicago's crosstown rivalry often displays itself in the world of sports, the split may run deeper than visceral attachments to the Cubbies or the Sox.

According to newly developed personality maps, the Windy City is balkanized on a whole different level.

People who view themselves as extroverted and agreeable tend to cluster on the South Side, while more experimental types with neurotic tendencies are living to the north and along the lake, the maps indicate. A sort of Bill Veeck versus Woody Allen divide.

"It always amazes me how patterns start to happen," said Kevin Stolarick, the University of Toronto researcher who crunched data from an online personality testing site to create the maps.

The site, outofservice.com/bigfive is still running. Its 45-question survey allows people to assess themselves in terms of five basic personality traits: extroversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, neurosis and conscientiousness.

Stolarick used data from 2,540 Chicagoans who took the test between February 2006 and February 2008, a subset of the nearly 560,367 who took the test nationwide in that period and supplied their postal codes.

If it's any consolation to cool-cookie North Siders, the national data indicated the central U.S., as a whole, tends to be more outgoing and agreeable than the rest of the country. The nationwide findings are included in a book, "Who's Your City," by Richard Florida, who is Stolarick's boss at the university's Martin Prosperity Institute.

But people in the Southern states view themselves as particularly gregarious, and the historic migration of Southern African-Americans to industrial jobs in the North helps explain South Siders' rosy self-images, Stolarick said.