Journal
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY
Volume 36, Issue 1, Pages 47-60Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/0890207021996970
Keywords
Big Five; BFI-2-S; personality facets; coronavirus; COVID-19
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Personality traits have a small impact on individuals' responses to the COVID-19 crisis, explaining only a portion of the variance in outcomes. Agreeableness and its Trust facet show the most robust associations with the outcomes, while most trait-outcome associations remain significant even when controlling for confounders such as sex, age, and risk-group membership.
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted people's daily routines and infused their lives with considerable insecurity and uncertainty. However, individuals' responses to the pandemic vary widely. The present study investigates the role of personality traits for key aspects of people's responses to the COVID-19 crisis. In a prospective design using a large-scale panel study (N = 2217) that represents the heterogeneity of the adult population in Germany, we examined whether Big Five domains and facets measured prior to the pandemic predicted individuals' responses to the pandemic in terms of: (a) perceptions of infection risks; (b) behavioral changes to prevent infection; (c) beliefs in the effectiveness of policy measures to combat the further spread of coronavirus; and (d) trust in relevant policymakers and institutions regarding the handling of coronavirus. Results revealed that personality explained only a small portion (between 0.6% and 3.8%) of the variance in the four outcomes. Nonetheless, several Big Five domains and facets had at least small-to-moderate, and theoretically plausible, associations with the outcomes. Overall, Agreeableness and its Trust facet showed the most robust associations with the four outcomes. Most trait-outcome associations were also robust to controlling for three possible confounders (sex, age, and risk-group membership).
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