Personality differences and COVID-19: are extroversion and conscientiousness personality traits associated with engagement with containment measures?

Introduction  In December 2019, an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) probably occurred in Wuhan, China. By March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) had declared a pandemic. Containment measures such as social distancing and hand hygiene were recommended. In this study, we start from the hypothesis that engaging with containment measures in a pandemic situation should be more comfortable for some people than for other people. Thus, individual differences should be associated with engagement with containment measures.

Objective  To investigate to what extent two personality traits, extroversion and conscientiousness, are associated with engagement with two containment measures (social distancing and handwashing).

Methods  The sample consisted of 715 Brazilian adults aged 18-78 years, who answered the Big Five Inventory 2 Short (BFI-2-S) and factors from the Dimensional Clinical Personality Inventory 2 (IDCP-2).

Results  Higher scores for extroversion were associated with lower means for social distancing (p < 0.001) and higher scores for conscientiousness were associated with higher means for social distancing and handwashing (p < 0.05).

Conclusion  The findings indicate the importance of acknowledging extroversion and conscientiousness traits as relevant to people’s engagement with the measures recommended for COVID-19 containment.

SARS-CoV-2, disease outbreaks, personality; extraversion, perfectionism