In Case You Haven't Heard…

Abstract

A worldwide survey conducted during the first wave of the COVID‐19 pandemic found that people with certain common personality traits were less likely to shelter at home when government policies were less restrictive, according to research published by the American Psychological Association (APA). “We found that people who scored low on two personality traits — openness to experience and neuroticism — were less likely to shelter at home in the absence of stringent government measures, but that tendency went away when more restrictive government policies were implemented,” Friedrich Götz, MPhil, a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study, stated in an APA news release. “Initially, this was a bit astounding, as open individuals have traditionally been shown to be prone to risk taking, willing to deviate from cultural norms and likely to seek out and approach novel and unfamiliar things — all of which would arguably put them at greater risk to ignore sheltering‐in‐place recommendations. However, at the same time, openness is also related to accurate risk perceptions, universalism and humankind identification. Thus, in the digitalized world in which the current pandemic occurred, these qualities may have led open individuals to follow the COVID‐19 outbreak in other countries, realize its severity and act accordingly.”