Personality and Motivation to Comply With COVID-19 Protective Measures in Germany

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic strains the healthcare systems, economy, education, and social life. Governments took several protective measures and formulated behavioral guidelines to prevent individual diseases and the collapse of healthcare systems. However, individual differences in the extent of compliance with the measures are apparent. To shed more light on this issue, the present correlational study examined the joint relation of several personal characteristics to people's motivation to comply with seven protective measures. Personal characteristics included age, gender, risk perception, the Big Five, the Dark Triad, conspiracy mentality, perceived locus of control, and general affect. Protective measures included social distancing, hygiene rules, wearing face masks, using a contact-tracing app, sharing one's infection status via the app, reducing physical contacts, and vaccinations. The study ran from 10 November 2020 to 29 December 2020. Based on a sample of 1,007 German-speaking participants, bivariate correlations and multiple regression analyses showed that personal characteristics are significantly linked to the motivation to comply with these measures. However, general affect, control beliefs, and basic personality traits play only a minor role. Age and gender showed some significant associations with protective measures. In contrast, protection motivation factors, in terms of perceived severity of and vulnerability to infection, and conspiracy mentality appear to be the major correlates of adopting protective behavior. The absolute motivation to comply with the measures also shows that hygiene rules and wearing face masks receive a higher average agreement than more personally intrusive measures such as physical contact restrictions and vaccinations. These results highlight that factors that are relevant to some measures may be irrelevant to other measures. Differences in people's personal characteristics should be considered in the design and communication of measures to support social acceptance and effectiveness. In this context, cognitive variables, which can be addressed by communication and education directly, seem to be more important than general affect and relatively time-invariant personality traits.

Online learning during the Covid-19 pandemic: How university students’ perceptions, engagement, and performance are related to their personal characteristics

“…In contrast, self-regulation skills showed no significant association with gender, although female students were found to have higher self-regulation skills in previous works on online learning (Alghamdi et al, 2020 ; Li, 2019 ). A more general explanation for this relation between perceived adaptability and gender could be that female students were more willing to adapt to changing conditions in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, as also reflected by higher acceptance and compliance with some protective measures (Kaspar & Nordmeyer, 2022 ; Zettler et al, 2022 ). In sum, gender did not play an important role in explaining inter-personal variance in online learning experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, corroborating previous results (Abdullah et al, 2022 ; Harvey et al, 2017 ; Rizvi et al, 2019 ; Yu, 2021 ).…”

“…How well students adapt to such life changes can heavily rely on their personal characteristics (Caspi & Moffitt, 1993;Pinquart & Silbereisen, 2004). In line with this theoretical assumption, several studies have found that age, gender, and personality traits are related to how strongly people are worried, perceive risks for their life and society, and accept to follow protective measures to counter the Covid-19 pandemic (Kaspar & Nordmeyer, 2022;Zettler et al, 2022). In fact, 56% of the variance in online learning outcomes at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic could be explained based on university students' personality traits, educational level, and gender (Yu, 2021).…”

Opiate maintenance patients’ attitudes and self-reported adherence to protective measures against SARS-CoV-2 infections

“…It is a reason of concern, however, that a significant proportion of patients did not feel adequately informed about the virus and countermeasures that mitigate virus transmission and dissemination. This in itself is a factor being associated with decreased levels of compliance to official recommendations ( 34 , 37 ). One protective factor could have been here the regular and often daily contact with the OMT clinic, where the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 countermeasures were enforced during the pandemic, which may have raised the awareness.…”

Prosociality predicts changes in leisure activities during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Results indicated that extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness subscale scores are positively associated with adherence to recommended protective measures. In contrast, Neuroticism is negatively related to these measures (Aschwanden et al, 2021;Kekäläinen et al, 2021;Kaspar and Nordmeyer, 2022;Moore et al, 2022;Otterbring and Festila, 2022). Additionally, previous studies have demonstrated the significant influence of the following personality traits, including aversion to infection (Stangier et al, 2021), self-control (Rodriguez et al, 2023), internal and external locus of control (Krampe et al, 2021), cultural values (Lu et al, 2021), curiosity (Losecaat Vermeer et al, 2022, and optimism (Sheetal et al, 2020) on health-protective behaviors.…”