Declining Influence of Personality in the Later Stage of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Nationwide Longitudinal Data from Ukraine

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars detected a significant association between personality traits and individual attitudes toward preventive policy measures. Policymakers were advised to take personality traits into account when designing targeted policies to curtail the spread of the virus. Few studies examined whether and to what extent personality traits predicted preventive behavior and attitudes in the later stages of the pandemic. We fill this gap using nationally representative panel data collected in Ukraine from 2019 to 2021 (1,409 unique participants). Consistent with the theory of personality coherence, we find that pre-pandemic personality traits have a better predictive capacity compared to personality traits measured during the pandemic. Personality effects are small (0.71 to 1.32 in odds ratios) and lose their predictive capacity over time, explaining about 2% of individual variability in pandemic behavior and attitudes (compared to 13% explained by individual exposure to COVID-19 in 2021). These findings advance our understanding of the role of personality in shaping responses to public health crises, suggesting that the predictive value of personality traits might be limited to the early stages of the public health crisis. Policymakers can utilize pre-pandemic personality traits to tailor policies early in the crisis while keeping in mind the limited predictive capacity and weakening effects on individual policy preferences over time.