The Personality and Geographical Ambiance (PANGEA) Lab is a research laboratory in the UBC Department of Psychology, under the direction of Dr. Friedrich Götz.
We are a group of psychologists, geographers, and computational social scientists who explore diverse methods to study the structure, development, and expression of personality and the multi-faceted ways in which it interacts with people’s physical and social environments. Examples of ongoing work include a project on the associations between regional personality traits and political, economic, social and health outcomes in China, Japan, Colombia, and New Zealand, a new theory of the emergence and evolution of social norms, and the data-driven development of a generalisable typology of value profiles.
Many of our projects adopt an interdisciplinary big data approach and we embrace the challenges and enjoy the rewards of frequently engaging in cross-disciplinary collaborations.
Within academia, we feel privileged to work with many wonderful collaborators around the world – from classically trained psychologists to economists, geographers, epidemiologists, and mathematicians –, including scholars at the University of Cambridge (UK), Columbia Business School (USA), University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), Waseda University (Japan), Harvard Business School (USA), University of California, Berkeley (USA), University of Oxford (UK), University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Stanford Graduate School of Business (USA), Beijing Normal University (China), University of Texas, Austin (USA), King’s College London (UK), New York University (USA), University of Melbourne (Australia), Arizona State University (USA), Karl-Landsteiner University (Austria), University of California, Santa Barbara (USA), and the University of Zurich (Switzerland).
Beyond academia, we take great pride in our long-term research partnership with the data journalism team at TIME Magazine and regularly collaborate with various other industry partners, such as Nokia Bell Labs or Google Jigsaw.
Together with our partners in crime at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland (Dr. Tobi Ebert’s lab), we have also launched the Regional Cultural Differences Conference – an interdisciplinary grassroots boutique conference at the nexus of psychology, geography, social data science, sociology, history, and economics – and hosted its inaugural edition in Barcelona (2022) and second iteration in Vancouver (2025).
If you want to learn more about our work and check out our latest publications, click here. If you are interested in getting to know our current team, click here. If you consider joining the PANGEA Lab as a graduate student or undergraduate student you can find more information here.
PANGEA Lab (mostly) all together in the Fall of 2025!