Mandate, Shmandate: Who Is (and Is Not) Staying at Home?

Source: Pexels / Yaroslav Danylchenko

Picture it (Sicily): You’re at the grocery store stocking up for the week. Every third person you pass is maskless and breathing their potentially contaminated air all over the place. You mutter to yourself, “why do they call it a mask mandate if there’s no actual mandate?” while holding your breath as they pass. You come home, where you’ll stay except for work, school, and groceries, and you hop on Instagram, where you see picture after picture of people out at restaurants, hanging out in large groups, and posing cheek to cheek without masks.

If you’re one of the rule followers, it can be maddening to see such flagrant flouting of public health suggestions, or in some cases, formal mandates. You might ask “what is wrong with these people?!” New data can’t tell you what is wrong with them, but a recent study can at least tell us something about what they tend to be like.

A recent study investigated the relationship of both personality traits and the strictness of lockdown orders to participants’ compliance with these orders in a sample of over 100,000 people from 55 different countries. The researchers suspected that stay at home orders would constitute what psychologists call a “strong situation,” or a situation in which the range of socially acceptable behaviors is greatly restricted, and as such, we would expect pretty much everyone to behave in uniform ways. Normally, personality governs to a large extent what we do and how we do it, but in strong situations, people have to put aside their personal tendencies and preferences to do what they are socially or legally required to do.

The researchers suspected that lockdowns would be quite a strong situation, prompting widespread compliance. But are there aspects of personality that trump even strong situations? And what about when stay at home orders aren’t really orders, per se, but more like requests that aren’t being enforced? Who follows the guidelines anyway, in spite of hard and fast orders?

Source: Pexels / Bruno Cervera

In the first month of COVID-19 closures around the world, the researchers measured the Big Five personality traits and the extent to which participants had stayed home in the last week. To determine the stringency of government policy regarding lockdown orders, the researchers gave each participating country a score from 0 to 100 based on whether they had missing, specific, or widespread regulations related to school and workplace closures, restrictions on local and international travel, cancellation of events and public transportation, and implementation of public health information campaigns.

As one would imagine (or at least, as one would hope), they found that the level of strictness imposed by the government did predict how much people stayed home; stronger orders meant more compliance. However, they also found that some people are just less likely to stay home. Extraversion, one’s tendency to be sociable, among other characteristics, negatively predicted following stay at home orders; the more extraverted, the less likely to shelter in place as prescribed.

The other Big Five traits positively predicted staying at home: the more open to experience (intellectual, imaginative, untraditional), agreeable (cooperative, trusting, sympathetic), conscientious (reliable, proactive, self-controlled), and neurotic (anxious, moody, easily stressed) participants were, the more likely they were to stay home. But while the open, nice, self-controlled, stressed people were self-isolating, the rigid, selfish, impulsive, easygoing people were out doing their thing. Openness to experience was related to staying at home to the same or a greater extent than variables we might expect to be the most influential, such as education level, age, and severity of COVID-19 in the participant’s home country.

But something really interesting happened when they examined the joint effects of government policy and personality traits. When policy was strict, openness to experience had less influence on whether participants adhered to the rules, and neuroticism’s influence disappeared altogether—it seems that participants seemed to follow the rules more often regardless of their personality traits. However, when policy was lax and there were fewer consequences to breaking the rules, these two traits were both linked to more staying at home.

Since neuroticism involves feeling anxious and responding more strongly to stressful situations, it is easy to imagine why people who are high in neuroticism would follow stay at home orders regardless of the level of government stringency: If the threat of COVID-19 induces stress, following these orders might minimize risk. On the other hand, if you’re low in neuroticism, and as a result, COVID-19 is less of a source of worry, you may be less likely to follow the rules if they are not enforced, as you do not have much anxiety to reduce.

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But why openness to experience? On the one hand, this result was somewhat surprising given that people high in openness tend to be rather nonconformist. However, the researchers speculated that this relationship may be because people who are higher in openness tend to adapt more easily to new situations and are more likely to research the situations they are in.

Extraverts may be more likely to violate stay at home orders because of their high sociability.

Source: Pexels / Alex Neel

Interestingly, the links between conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion and following lockdown orders did not change depending on the strictness of the rules. For example, extraverts were more likely to break the rules no matter how strong the restrictions were. Agreeable and conscientious people were more likely to follow the rules regardless.

It is important to note that these correlations were small, but nonetheless, they were consistent. While there are certainly a wide variety of personal and environmental influences on lockdown compliance, personality traits explain part of the story.