Actually, two of your complaints cancel out. You should expect that the population living in Berkeley has a very young personality, but if all the data is from college students, then there’s nothing special about Berkeley (except that it is large and thus small effects are statistically significant — but the claim is that it has a large effect).
I think you are correct that the data is all college students (or at least fairly young people). I believe this because the cities being discussed are the hometown, not the current residence, which is the kind of thing you’d do with college students. In any event, studying hometown controls for the age demographics of Berkeley. But Jonah should have explicitly controlled for age.
Added: poking around the website I don’t see a clear answer to how old the data is. Most of it seems to have been collected by 2011, but I’m not sure because there are lots of variations. Each big5 score is labeled with the date taken.
I think you are correct that the data is all college students (or at least fairly young people). I believe this because the cities being discussed are the hometown, not the current residence, which is the kind of thing you’d do with college students. In any event, studying hometown controls for the age demographics of Berkeley. But Jonah should have explicitly controlled for age.
Actually, two of your complaints cancel out. You should expect that the population living in Berkeley has a very young personality, but if all the data is from college students, then there’s nothing special about Berkeley (except that it is large and thus small effects are statistically significant — but the claim is that it has a large effect).
I think you are correct that the data is all college students (or at least fairly young people). I believe this because the cities being discussed are the hometown, not the current residence, which is the kind of thing you’d do with college students. In any event, studying hometown controls for the age demographics of Berkeley. But Jonah should have explicitly controlled for age.
Added: poking around the website I don’t see a clear answer to how old the data is. Most of it seems to have been collected by 2011, but I’m not sure because there are lots of variations. Each big5 score is labeled with the date taken.
Good point, I missed this.