"How Personality and Policy Predict Pandemic Behavior: Understanding Sheltering-in-Place in 55 Countries at the Onset of COVID-19": Correction.

Abstract

Reports an error in "How personality and policy predict pandemic behavior: Understanding sheltering-in-place in 54 countries at the onset of COVID-19" by Friedrich M. Götz, Andrés Gvirtz, Adam D. Galinsky and Jon M. Jachimowicz (American Psychologist, 2021[Jan], Vol 76[1], 39-49). In the article "How Personality and Policy Predict Pandemic Behavior: Understanding Sheltering-in-Place in 55 Countries at the Onset of COVID-19," by Friedrich M. Götz, Andrés Gvirtz, Adam D. Galinsky, and Jon M. Jachimowicz (American Psychologist, 2021, Vol. 76, No. 1, pp. 39-49, https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000740), there were two errors. First, there were translation errors in the Japanese and Korean versions of the Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI; Gosling et al., 2003). Second, there was an error in the termination logic that applied to 195 individuals: The skip logic that was meant to automatically move participants to terminate the survey if they selected "no, I would not like to participate" was not working for all participants, and 195 of these participants completed the survey even after selecting this option. To rectify these errors, we (a) recoded the data from the Korean version (in which two items had been accidentally swapped in their presentation order), (b) dropped all participants who completed the Japanese version of the data (which contained an inaccurate translation), and (c) dropped all participants for whom the termination logic did not work properly. Together these exclusions amounted to 0.81% of our sample. When we reran all analyses with the corrected sample of 100,196 participants from 54 countries (i.e., 99.19% of the original sample size), all interpretations, significance levels, and standard errors remained exactly the same. There were only minor changes in a few coefficients in our focal model, and these were rare and very small (Model 3, see Table 1). Among the focal predictors, these are "stringency index" (coefficient changes from .094 to .092) and "extraversion" (coefficient changes from -.025 to -.024). Among the control variables, these are "female" (coefficient changes from .036 to .034), "health" (coefficient changes from -.015 to -.016), "logged confirmed cases (t - 1)" (coefficient changes from -.115 to -.122), "logged confirmed deaths (t - 1)" (coefficient changes from .026 to .027) and "estimated infections in one month" (coefficient changes from .012 to .013). The full set of updated analyses is available in the online supplemental materials: https://doi.org/10.1037/ amp0000740.supp. The online version of this article has been corrected. (The abstract of the original article appeared in record 2020-76208-001.) (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).