Personality Traits and Public Health Compliance During COVID-19
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the role of enduring individual differences in shaping people’s willingness to follow public health guidance. Research has converged on a set of personality dimensions that reliably predict compliance with measures such as social distancing, hand hygiene and mask wearing. Within the Big Five framework, high conscientiousness and agreeableness consistently correlate with greater adherence, while extraversion and neuroticism exhibit more nuanced effects depending on situational constraints and emotional regulation strategies. Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissistic rivalry—are associated with lower rates of protective behaviours and diminished receptivity to prosocial messaging. A complementary line of enquiry into personality functioning highlights how deficits in self-regulation and adaptive coping relate to both heightened distress and reduced motivation to comply. These findings have global significance, suggesting that tailoring public health communications to individual dispositional profiles can enhance the effectiveness of pandemic mitigation and inform interventions in future crises.
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Personality Traits and Public Health Compliance During COVID-19 publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in personality traits and public health compliance during covid-19 across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Big Five personality traits: A model comprising five broad domains—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism—that describe the major dimensions of human personality.
Dark Triad traits: Three socially aversive dimensions—Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissistic rivalry—that predict manipulative, callous or antisocial behaviours.
Personality functioning: A framework assessing self-regulatory capacities and adaptive defence mechanisms that underpin emotional stability and interpersonal effectiveness.
Latent profile analysis: A statistical method for identifying unobserved subgroups within a population based on patterns of responses across multiple variables.
References
- How personality functioning relates to psychological distress and behavioral attitudes during the Covid-19 pandemic. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience (2024).
- Who complies with the restrictions to reduce the spread of COVID-19?: Personality and perceptions of the COVID-19 situation. Personality and Individual Differences (2020).
- Adaptive and Dark Personality in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Predicting Health-Behavior Endorsement and the Appeal of Public-Health Messages. Social Psychological and Personality Science (2020).
- To comply or not comply? A latent profile analysis of behaviours and attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic. PLOS ONE (2021).
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