University of Cambridge study shows how your personality influences your lockdown behaviour

A person’s personality influences how likely they are to stay at home during the Covid-19 pandemic – and that cannot be entirely overridden, a huge study by psychologists has found.

Researchers from Cambridge, Columbia and Harvard universities surveyed more than 101,000 people in 55 countries to find out whether they were staying at home as the coronavirus outbreak surged in late March and early April 2020.

They found that extroverts were the least likely to follow official guidance to stay at home. Tailoring public health messages towards the more extroverted in society could encourage greater overall compliance in populations, and help tackle the spread of coronavirus, the researchers suggest.

Dr Friedrich Götz, in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Psychology, and first author of the report, said: “Extroverts are gregarious and sociable, and they found it especially hard to stay cooped up at home and not see other people.

“They were most likely to break lockdown rules, and stayed at home less than people of any other personality type during March and April.”

Five key traits commonly used by psychologists to characterise personality – agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness – were explored in the study.

Agreeable people tend to be more compliant and trusting, while conscientious ones are diligent and law-abiding. Unsurprisingly, people scoring highly for these personality traits tend to stay at home when advised to do so by their government.

Meanwhile, people who scored as highly neurotic, and those with very open-minded personalities decided to stay at home more even before lockdowns were put into place because they were already concerned about catching Covid-19.

These groups are more likely to maintain social distancing than other personality types, the researchers suggest, even when restrictions on movements are lifted.

“Highly neurotic people had decided early on that this virus wasn’t something to mess with, and they were staying at home,” said Dr Götz.

Andrés Gvirtz, a PhD researcher in Cambridge’s Department of Psychology and second author of the study, said: “Open-minded people tend to be very well-connected and interested in the wider world, so we think they realised the potential impact of coronavirus earlier than others and acted accordingly.

“Watching TV reports of the Covid-19 situation in Italy for instance, which was ahead of the UK in terms of the impact of the virus, was informing the behaviour of open-minded people at the beginning of the pandemic.”

With tight restrictions imposed by many governments in late March and early April, there was high compliance. More than 80 per cent of people surveyed across the world said they were staying at home.

“Government regulations do very much influence the behaviour of the population at large, but we need to recognise that not all of the people will follow all of the rules. Extroverts pose a particular challenge during the pandemic, because they are least likely to stay at home when governments advise it,” said Dr Götz.

The researchers scored participants’ personalities on the ‘strength’ of each of the five key personality traits, across a seven-point scale. A single point change in a person’s tendency towards any of these traits was found to alter their likelihood of staying at home by around one per cent.

The researchers stressed that even this small percentage has important consequences, because of the global scale and contagiousness of the virus.

There are, however, aspects of personality traits that may compete.

“On the one hand, more conscientious people are more likely to follow rules, are more cautious and socially responsible, and more considerate of other people’s health, which may make them more likely to comply with stringent government policy. On the other hand, more conscientious people are also more industrious, dutiful, and self-disciplined, which may make them more likely to continue leaving their home in order to go to work and follow other aspects of their routine, including exercise.

“Along those lines, more agreeable people tend to be more empathetic, more compassionate, and more conformist, which may make them more likely to comply with governmental stringency and stay at home. At the same time, more agreeable people also seek more frequent interpersonal contact – although unlike extroverts, they prefer small but intimate social networks – which may also make it more difficult for them to abide by social distancing rules.”

But extroverts are the least likely to adhere to restrictions.

“Because more stringent government policies are more likely to deny extroverted people the behavioral freedom that matters so highly to them, extroverted individuals may be less likely to comply with policy interventions,” the paper notes.

So how could public health messages be tailored towards them to encourage compliance?

The researchers suggest conveying an understanding of how hard it is to stay at home – particularly for people who really enjoy being with their friends and family – and stressing that the guidance is in place to protect those people.

The research was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the Cambridge Trust and Peterhouse, Cambridge. The results were published in the journal American Psychologist.

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