Boston's a very cold place indeed.

Here in LA, we hear a lot about how Boston still has a rep for being a racist place, a city that is "unwelcoming" to black folks (and, according to the Boston Globe, Latinos. Some urban legends just never, ever die,). Dig a little deeper, and we usually find that a lot of these stories are either a) more than 30 years old, b) told by people who've never been to Boston or c) are indeed true, but also similar to stories we’ve heard from white folks, too.

We’ve often suggested that maybe it’s not racism, but the simple fact that Boston is a very, very cold city. We don’t hate minorities per se - we just hate everybody*.

So we're interested in this new study reported on in the Wall Street Journal. They posted results of a survey that ranks the personality profiles of all 50 states

"... according to new research on the geography of personality. Based on more than 600,000 questionnaires and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the study maps regional clusters of personality traits, then overlays state-by-state data on crime, health and economic development in search of correlations.

Massachusetts? We rank bottom 10 in extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. (But top 4 in Openness, whatever that means. If you've ever tried to get a drink after 1:30 AM, you'll know there's nothing open about Boston)

* We speak from personal experience. 8 years ago a few of the Ten ventured into a bar in South Boston: a crew of lifelong Bostonians, accompanied by the scion of a famous Southie family and, well, this is what happened...