This week, an international team of researchers published the results of a study indicating people who hail from warmer, more pleasant areas of these United States are—and this is a scientific term—way more chill than those who grew up watching their parents dutifully scrape ice off their windshields every morning. This news somehow comes as both a legitimately fascinating finding, and also as the most obvious damn thing you've ever heard in your life.

While behavioral scientists have long understood that human personality varies significantly across geographic reasons, the root cause of these differences has remained a vexing mystery. Using the results of a personality evaluation completed by some 1.6 million Americans, however, these researchers were able to identify a positive association between development of the so-called Big Five personality characteristics—agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion, and openness to experience—and the extent to which each individual grew up in a mild climate. Temperature remained predictive of these traits even after controlling for things like age, gender, economic status, and other things that might be expected to play a role in the development of one's general outlook on life. As the researchers put it:

Clement (that is, mild) temperatures encourage individuals to explorethe outside environment, where both social interactions and newexperiences abound; by contrast, when the ambient temperature iseither too hot or too cold, individuals are less likely to go outside(for example, to meet up with friends, or to try new activities).

Again, for anyone who has had the opportunity to live among people from both ends of the meteorological spectrum, this conclusion seems so intuitive that it's hard to imagine why anyone decided that it merited detailed scientific inquiry, but still: All those stereotypes you hold dear about people from different parts of the country finally have the empirically-supported explanation for which you've been yearning. (It's not your fault, Massholes.)

These findings also seem to provide support for an observation that anyone traveling to Southern California for the first time has made, likely after introducing themselves to a stranger: Hot places beget hot people. If it's warm, you're likelier to enjoy going outside and doing fun things with people, who, in turn, also enjoy going outside and doing fun things! Complaining going for a run every morning is tough when the temperature is constantly 70 degrees and sunny. On the other hand, when eight feet of snow in 36 hours has rendered outdoor exercise impossible, and when the mere act of leaving your home requires four jackets and three scarves and two giant boots that take ten minutes to lace and then immediately come undone the moment you cross the threshold and venture bravely into the elements, it's a whole lot easier to shrug, put your running shoes in the closet, and bury yourself in the Netflix queue until spring.

According to science, if you want to be a cool, fun, fit person who regularly enjoys the company of other cool, fun, fit people, see if your employer has a San Diego office that could use an extra body. If you don't want any of those things, carry on with what you're doing. The Celtics are fun to watch right now, I guess.

Jay Willis is a staff writer at GQ covering news, law, and politics. Previously, he was an associate at law firms in Washington, D.C. and Seattle, where his practice focused on consumer financial services and environmental cleanup litigation. He studied social welfare at Berkeley and graduated from Harvard Law School... Read moreRelated Stories for GQCalifornia