The game of chess offers a conducive setting to explore basic cognitive processes, including decision-making. The game exercises analytical cause-and-effect thinking skills regardless of the level of play. Moreover, chess portals provide information on the chess games played and serve as a vast database. The numbers of games played thus have the potential to be analyzed comprehensively, including for purposes other than analyzing chess matches only. The primary objective of this study is to develop a methodology for using information obtained from chess games for geospatial social analysis. The assumption is that the methodology will allow for general geographical variation in personality inference in the future, relying on big data from chess databases. Future large-scale studies of the geographical differentiation of personality traits using the developed methodology may be applicable in a number of ways. The results can be used wherever cross-sectional social analyses are needed in the context of personality traits (decision-making) to better understand their geographical background. In turn, the geographical distribution of these traits is accompanied by a range of important social, educational, health, political and economic implications.
Keywords: chess; decision-making; geographic differentiation of personality; personality traits.