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  • January 2021
  • Article
  • American Psychologist

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
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Abstract

The spread of COVID-19 within any given country or community at the onset of the pandemic depended in part on the sheltering-in-place rate of its citizens. The pandemic led us to revisit one of psychology’s most fundamental and most basic questions in a high-stakes context: What determines human behavior? Adopting a Lewinian interactionist lens, we investigate the independent and joint effects of macro-level government policies and micro-level psychological factors—i.e., personality—on whether individuals sheltered-in-place. We analyzed data collected in late March and early April 2020 from 101,005 participants in 55 countries, a time period that coincided with the early and accelerating stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. This time period also contained substantial variation in the stringency of governmental policy towards sheltering-in-place, both between countries and within each country over time. Analyses revealed that personality and the stringency of governmental policies independently predicted sheltering-in-place rates. Policy stringency was positively related to sheltering-in-place. For the personality dimensions, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism all predicted higher rates of sheltering-in-place, whereas extraversion was negatively related to staying at home. In addition, two personality traits—openness to experience and neuroticism—interacted with governmental policy to predict whether individuals sheltered-in-place; openness and neuroticism each had weaker effects on sheltering-in-place as governmental policies became stricter. Theoretically, the findings demonstrate that individual differences predict behavior (i.e., sheltering-in-place) even when governments take strong action targeting that behavior. Practically, they suggest that even if governments lift their shelter-in-place restrictions, some individuals will shelter-in-place less than others.

Keywords

COVID; COVID-19; Pandemic; Shelter-in-place; Personality; Government; Interactionism; Health Pandemics; Behavior; Personal Characteristics; Policy; Governance Compliance

Citation

Götz, Friedrich M., Andrés Gvirtz, Adam D. Galinsky, and Jon M. Jachimowicz. "How Personality and Policy Predict Pandemic Behavior: Understanding Sheltering-in-Place in 55 Countries at the Onset of COVID-19." American Psychologist 76, no. 1 (January 2021): 39–49.
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About The Author

Jon M. Jachimowicz

Organizational Behavior
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More from the Authors
  • Riding the Passion Wave or Fighting to Stay Afloat? A Theory of Differentiated Passion Contagion By: Emma Frank, Kai Krautter, Wen Wu and Jon M. Jachimowicz
  • Giving Up on a Passion: Elizabeth Rowe at the Boston Symphony Orchestra By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon and Alexis Lefort
  • A Potential Pitfall of Passion: Passion Is Associated with Performance Overconfidence By: Erica R. Bailey, Kai Krautter, Wen Wu, Adam D. Galinsky and Jon M. Jachimowicz
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