Well, well… here we go. World Awareness Day… an odd one indeed, but one that everyone can relate to. Most of us have dealt with our own egos tripping us up from time-to-time. And I haven’t yet met a person alive who hasn’t felt that someone else’s ego was too big by at least half. (I left Geography at the University of Wisconsin due to one person’s ego suffocating me…)

And my kids often remind me to keep my ego in check when I start ranting to them about humans being nothing more than software running on two-bit DNA code. Something about getting canceled – and being an absolutely insane position. I plead the fifth.

Fortunately, there have been a variety of large surveys done on narcissism and egotistical behavioral traits around the world. Unfortunately, most of them involve self-reporting and self-assessment, which is the surest way to break the scientific method when studying ego, because… well, um… yeah, people’s egos.

Alas, it’s what we have. I collected all of the “scientific” surveys / studies I could find. Then merged the data using Perplexity Pro. Then, because the mini-golf map consumed so much of my energy yesterday, I decided to write a relatively short and flippant prompt for Web Map GPT to decipher and do something with – I also gave it my dataset.

Low-and-behold, the map it produced was, though by no means perfect, half-decent. I decided to have it offer the user numerous color ramps and different classification schemes again.

Understandably, no non-map nerd would ever want that stuff, but I like testing what prompt cartography can allow you to do in about two sentences of text. Plus, I wanted to see it decide which Color Brewer schemes to use. Yes, you can read them; but, no, they rarely look good. The bane of intelligent design, I suppose.

But there’s my ego again… if I don’t like how the Color Brewer colors look aesthetically (and again, they are readable, which is important!), why don’t I create my own version of a color mixer? The Muehlenhaus Color Masher or something?

Hmmm… not a bad idea. Maybe I’ll ask my agents to start helping me build that after dinner.

But first, here is a map of egos and narcissists across numerous surveys that you can pick and choose from.

According to the surveys, German males turn out to be the worst. Again, though, and in defense of German males everywhere, even those living vicariously through their spouse’s name, this was self-reported data. In reality, perhaps what this survey is showing is that German males are the most honest and most other self-reporting males are lying liars who lie… or something?

In other words, don’t read into the map too much. Just enjoy the color selection, and make sure you take a moment to enjoy Ego Awareness Day this year.

Thanks.

View map here.

Web Map GPT Prompt

# Intention
Next week is International Ego Day or something silly like that.

I have collected some data on about 50-plus countries and their unofficial level of narcissism and ego.

Please create an equal earth map of the world with a beautiful layout and legend titled “Ego Checker”.

Create a stylized interactive legend that allows the user to change the classification scheme, number of classes (between 4 and 7), and select from a variety of Color Brewer approved palettes. Include Standard Deviation (diverging color chemes needed), natural breaks (default, 5 classes default), equal interval, and quantiles.