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 Japan, Colombia, and New Zealand, a systematic, global review on the behavioural, affective and cognitive correlates of different personality traits during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the development of an AI-driven tool to automate the development of questionnaire-based personality measures.
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 and mathematicians –, including scholars at the University of Cambridge, Columbia Business School, University of Mannheim, Waseda University, Harvard Business School, University of California, Berkeley, Beijing Normal University, University of Texas, Austin, Imperial College London, University of Melbourne, Karl-Landsteiner University, and the University of Zurich.
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.
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.