You’ll Find the Most Stereotypical Americans in These States

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america map

The United States is an incredibly diverse country, but there are some stereotypes that people who live outside the country have about Americans as a whole. The general stereotype is Americans are highly religious and wealthy consumers who spend their time firing guns, driving vehicles, stuffing their faces, watching reality TV, and are averse to traveling or learning about anything beyond their borders. Now certainly not every American fits that stereotype, but Estately set out to determine where that stereotype is most fitting.

To do this we ranked each state from 1-50 using the eight criteria listed below.

  • Fast food restaurants per capita (source: Yellow Pages)
  • Miles driven annually per capita (source: U.S. PIRG)
  • Percentage of residents who don’t have a passport (source: U.S. Department of State)
  • Percentage of residents who own a gun (source: General Social Survey)
  • Percentage of residents who describe themselves as “very religious” (source: Gallup)
  • Google searches related to reality TV (source: Google Trends)
  • Percentage of population that are millionaires (source: Phoenix Marketing International)
  • Money spent per capita on retail shopping (source: U.S Census)
  • Buffets per capita (source: Yellow Pages)

There were a number of ties, which we broke by determining which states perform vastly more Google searches for NFL football than FIFA World Cup (source: Google Trends). In the end, we learned Missouri, Tennessee, and South Dakota are the most akin to the stereotypical American, whereas Rhode Island, Oregon and New York are the least.

america chart

Ryan Nickum