Personality in a pandemic: Social norms moderate associations between personality and social distancing behaviors

Abstract

To limit the transmission of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), it is important to understand the sources of social behavior for members of the general public. However, there is limited research on how basic psychological dispositions interact with social contexts to shape behaviors that help mitigate contagion risk, such as social distancing. Using a sample of 89,305 individuals from 39 countries, we show that Big Five personality traits and the social context jointly shape citizens' social distancing during the pandemic. Specifically, we observed that the association between personality traits and social distancing behaviors were attenuated as the perceived societal consensus for social distancing increased. This held even after controlling for objective features of the environment such as the level of government restrictions in place, demonstrating the importance of subjective perceptions of local norms.

Peers for the fearless: Social norms facilitate preventive behaviour when individuals perceive low COVID-19 health risks

“…Besides variables that change during the pandemic, stable individual characteristics may influence health risk perceptions, social norm perceptions, and preventive behaviour. For instance, a rich literature in psychology suggests that personality traits (such as agreeableness) influence preventive behaviour and how closely people adhere to social conventions regarding healthy behaviour [ 11 , 95 , 96 ]. After accounting for time-invariant differences between individuals, this effect should be rather small in our case, but it may still be important to understand the stable differences between individuals in their adherence to preventive behaviour.…”

“…So far, the literature on preventive behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic has mostly concentrated on the first few months of the pandemic in early 2020. We argue that this focus has potential drawbacks because developments during the pandemic not only fundamentally changed individual perceptions of the costs and benefits of preventive behaviour, but also changed the “contexts” in which individuals make behavioural decisions [ 11 ]. Different social contexts in form of fast-paced changes in government regulations and varying information about the current state of the pandemic influence citizen’s ability to deviate from publicly promoted preventive behaviour.…”

The psychological and socio-political consequences of infectious diseases: Authoritarianism, governance, and nonzoonotic (human-to-human) infection transmission

“…Furthermore, a more fine-grained, computationally-minded analysis of temporal and cultural dynamics (Kashima, Perfors, Ferdinand, & Pattenden, 2021;Muthukrishna & Schaller, 2020) might shed more light on how authoritarian attitudes and governance change in tandem or asynchronously, and the potential role of disease prevalence and outbreaks in modulating these processes. A recent investigation demonstrates that personality traits interact with the social context to shape citizens' social distancing behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic (Ludeke, Vitriol, Larsen, & Gensowski, 2021), illustrating that context, geography, and personality dispositions can have joint and amplifying effects on each other. Acknowledging these (potentially non-linear) interactions is particularly important when we con sider real-life ideologically-motivated behavior such as extreme political action and violence (Zmigrod & Goldenberg, 2021).…”

Alone at Home: The Impact of Social Distancing on Norm-consistent Behavior

“…This voluntary compliance resembles a classical collective action problem for which the development of social norms increase the probability of individuals solving these problems (Ostrom, 2000). Using a sample of almost 90k individuals from 39 countries, Ludeke et al (2021) show that local social norms are indeed an important determinant of social distancing behaviors. Similarly, Durante et al (2021) find that in areas with higher civic capital defined as "those persistent and shared beliefs and values that help a group overcome the free-rider problem in the pursuit of socially valuable activities" mobility declined both before and after a mandatory national lockdown in Italy (see also Barrios et al, 2021, for the impact of civic capital in both the US and European regions).…”