Openness to New Experiences Predicts How Fast Cities Adopt New Tech

A new study of 3.2 million Americans suggests that a city’s willingness to embrace new technology is linked to its residents’ openness to new experiences, even after accounting for factors like income and education.

A specific psychological trait known as “openness” is a key factor associated with how quickly platforms like Uber, Airbnb, and Flickr gain traction in different metropolitan areas.

Researchers found that regions with higher scores in openness—a personality trait encompassing curiosity and a taste for the unfamiliar—tended to adopt these innovations much earlier than their more traditional counterparts. This pattern remained consistent across 349 metropolitan areas in the lower 48 states, even after accounting for economic and structural variables like income, education, and internet access.

The research, led by Tobias Ebert of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and Martin Obschonka of the University of Amsterdam, reported these findings. While the team noted they haven’t established a definitive cause-and-effect relationship, the consistency of the data was striking.

The invisible social infrastructure

In many ways, new digital platforms require a leap of faith from the public. An Airbnb host must be willing to let strangers into their home, and an Uber driver must feel comfortable using their personal vehicle for public transport. These services rely on “network effects,” where the platform only becomes truly useful once enough people in a specific area agree to participate.

Openness to New Experiences Predicts How Fast Cities Adopt New Tech — Photo: aol.com

“Someone has to be willing to try a new behavior before everyone else regards it as normal,” said Obschonka, of the Amsterdam Business School.

The study utilized a massive dataset of over 3.2 million people who responded to a 44‑statement personality survey between 2004 and 2015. By mapping these responses to zip codes, the team was able to calculate average openness scores for hundreds of metro areas. The results showed regional variation.

In Bismarck, North Dakota, the average openness score was 3.48 out of 5. In contrast, Santa Fe, New Mexico, reached an average of 3.93. While these numbers seem close, the real‑world impact is massive: in the least open regions, only about 21 % of residents scored as “open,” whereas in the most open regions, that number climbed to 48 %.

How openness translates to real numbers

To move beyond self‑reported surveys, the research team analyzed actual economic activity through tax records. They looked at new accommodation filings for Airbnb and changes in passenger transportation filings for Uber. For the photo‑sharing site Flickr, they analyzed a sample of 80 million uploaded photos to see which regions were earliest to participate.

The data revealed that a single standard deviation increase in a region’s openness score led to measurable surges in service adoption. For a large city like New York, that difference could represent roughly 450 more Airbnb hosts and more than 9 000 additional ride‑share drivers over a five‑year period.

Metric	Impact of Higher Openness (per 100,000 residents)
New Accommodation Hosts	~2.4 additional hosts
Ride‑share Drivers	~48 additional drivers

The geographic spread of this adoption was also distinct. San Francisco, Portland, and Austin were repeatedly identified as some of the strongest adopters. On the other end of the spectrum, cities like El Paso, Flint, and Jackson were among the weakest in embracing these specific technologies.

In the five years after Airbnb launched, San Diego gained 9.5 new accommodation businesses per 100,000 residents, which is more than four times the 2.2 recorded in Minneapolis.

The limits of personality‑driven growth

It is easy to assume that wealthy, highly educated cities will always lead the charge in tech adoption. However, the researchers found that openness was the only variable that reliably predicted adoption across all three platforms, even after they adjusted for age, race, gender, unemployment, and political leanings or religiosity.

This suggests that while a city needs the “hardware”—the internet and the money—to support a new app, it also needs the “software”—the psychological willingness of the people—to make it work. Without that willingness, even the most well‑funded metropolitan area may struggle to move a new service from a niche novelty to a daily necessity.

That said, the study has its limitations. The researchers noted that the data is a snapshot in time, which makes it difficult to determine if open people naturally migrate to tech‑heavy cities, or if the presence of new tech actually makes a population more open over time.

The future of how cities integrate emerging technologies may depend on more than just the next software update. As Obschonka suggested, the success of any genuinely new technology hinges heavily on whether the local population is ready to experiment with it.