Does climate shape people's personality?

Even though some may find the claim that climate affects people’s personality as completely unfounded, I dare say that climate, on the contrary, plays a decisive role in moulding people's personality traits.

Needles to say, there’s a sharp contrast between people inhabiting the north hemisphere and people inhabiting the south hemisphere in terms of character and attitude to life. In the main, people who live in cold places,usually in the north hemisphere, are said to be restrained and to have a more down-to-earth view of life, while people who live in warmer counries, mainly in the south hemisphere, are belived to be hot-blooded and to have a happy-go-lucky attitude.

Some may say that those assumptions are misguided and that are only based on what are stereotypes, that is, generalisations about people from different countries that foreigners make about them. For instance, people from Italy are believed to be lazy, self-indulgent, though, I am afraid this is only true for people from the South of Italy and not for the entire country, or else why is it then that northern Italians are considered hard-working and perseverant? So are we talking about stereotypes for a whole country? I reckon this difference is not a matter of stereotypes, least a matter of north versus south, but a matter of weather conditions, the milder the weather, the more amiable and easy-going the people are . To further illustrate my point, we could take Spain, or even Argentina as other examples. People living in the south of Spain and people living in the north of Argentina, more closely resemble people from the south of Italy, and this is so due to the fact that the weather conditions of those areas are warm.

To sum up, it is only natutal that the climate has a bearing on people’s personality. People that live in countries where they barely see the daylight are naturally confined, throughout the year, to enclosed places and this can only make them introspective and completely dedicated to their work or studies. While, on the other hand, it is only reasonable for people that live in places where the sun shines all day long to spend more time socializing than being secluded.