Announcer: You are listening to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Mandira Banerjee: I am Mandira Banerjee from University of Michigan News Service and today we are talking to Psychology Professor Christopher Peterson about his new research.

Professor Peterson and his colleague Nansook Park have studied more than 50 large US cities. They have then described each city as either heart-strong city or a head-strong city. So tell us what makes a city a heart-strong city or a head-strong city.

Christopher Peterson: The residence of these large cities completed a survey that measures character strengths. Dr. Park and I have studied character strengths for a decade and some of these strengths are intellectual and self-focused, things like creativity and curiosity and appreciation of beauty. Some cities had residents who scored relatively high in these strengths.

Other strengths that we studied are more emotional and more interpersonal, things like gratitude, kindness, and again we calculated the average scores within a city on these strengths and found that some cities are higher than others on these heart strengths.

Now it’s convenient to talk about head strengths and heart strengths in either/or terms. They tend to not to go together, but there are exceptions. So a city can be high on both or low on both. So when we talk, we’ll use a shorthand way, but don’t hear it as an either/or thing.

Mandira Banerjee: Most of the time when psychologists are studying cities, they’re talking about obesity crime, how did you think about studying about urban life?

Christopher Peterson: We are part of a new perspective within psychology called Positive Psychology. So we had these survey data available and we started to look at them and found that there were these interesting differences across cities and we started to read some more and realized cities arose because people found them safer and healthier, and people moved to them because they were exciting.

So we decided to present our findings in the larger context of what’s right about cities. The majority of people in the United States live in large cities. Indeed the majority of people in the world live in large cities and this will only change. We are an urban species. We are not a small town species anymore.

Mandira Banerjee: Tell us about some of the cities that grant high and heart strengths and some which aren’t high in head strengths.

Christopher Peterson: Well, the head strengths, these are the centers of innovation and accomplishment. It’s where every college graduate wants to go and for instance like Boston and San Francisco and Atlanta and Chicago. Less well-known are the cities that scored high on our heart strengths and these are cities like El Paso; Mesa, Arizona or Miami, Florida; Virginia Beach; Fresno, California and somebody who knows something about US geography might say, gee! Those cities are all in the south and indeed that is what we found that the heart cities tend to be warmer cities. We’ve also found that the high scoring heart cities have more children present.

Mandira Banerjee: So which one is better, is it better to lead with your heart or is it better to lead with your head.

Christopher Peterson: We study character strengths, all character strengths are good. So there is probably no answer to that question. I would just say it’s best to master both. There is a time to lead with your head and a time to lead with your heart and you have to be wise enough to know one point to follow the one or the other, but our data don’t show that. Our conclusion and our paper was also a disregard, and we don’t think that the Chambers of Commerce of Detroit or El Paso should try to be like Boston or San Francisco.

Mandira Banerjee:  We are talking to Professor Christopher Peterson about his newest research, thank you so much!

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