The Psychological Roots of Acquiescence and Resistance: How Personality Traits Explains Public Attitudes toward Governments’ Responses to COVID-19
Session
Psychology
Description
The advent of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic unleashed a plethora of government responses to that public health crisis, as well as public perceptions and reaction toward both the disease and government policies to prevent and control its spread. Emerging research in behavioral sciences is trying to explain such attitudes from various perspectives. A body of literature has tried to explain public attitudes toward both the pandemic and government measures to prevent and control it with people’s socioeconomic features such as by age, gender, race, employment status, essential worker status, income, and being a parent. Other research has focused on the effect of personality traits in people’s fear from and protection against COVID-19. Yet other research has pointed to the role of political attitudes, beliefs and orientations as explanatory factors of people’s attitudes toward both the pandemics and government policies to prevent and control it. Our efforts rest on the old yet unsettled debate on what affect human behavior. One camp emphasizes the role of situational. The other camp stresses the role of biologically-rooted personality traits, more recently formulated as the Big Five personality traits in human behavior. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and governments’ reactions against it generated a wide array of public attitudes, spanning from panic toward the disease and total obedience with governments’ measures to combat it to indifference toward the risk to open challenges against governments’ anti-Covid-19 efforts. Such a milieu would represent a nice setting and offer new opportunities to revisit the situational/environmental versus psychological debate and investigate which factors mostly affect and better explain people’s behavior both toward the pandemic and governments’ efforts to prevent and control it. We investigate the role of three sets of variables, the Big Five personality traits, political trust and socioeconomic variables to model their role on people’s attitudes toward government’s responses against COVID-19. Whereas the socioeconomic factors and the Big Five personality traits represent the two sides of the already raging situational/environmental versus psychological debate, the political trust factors represent something in the middle, since belief systems are informed from both personality traits and life experiences. Therefore, interjecting them into the debate might help to find some middle ground between the situational/environmental factors and personality traits. We test our hypotheses by relying on a random digit dialing (RDD) cellphone public opinion survey, which included an experimental research design, that we conducted in Kosovo during the fall 2020. Our experiment randomly divided respondents in two groups asking the same set of questions, with one of them asked about their attitudes government’s “protective measures” and the other one primed with “lockdowns” rather than “protective measures.” The experiment’s purpose is to investigate if there is any response difference between both sets of questions, and if yes, what role the three sets of hypothesized factors, the socioeconomic, the personality and the belief system (political trust) factors play in such response differences.
Keywords:
Big-Five personality model, government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, political trust, protective measures, lockdowns, Kosovo
Proceedings Editor
Edmond Hajrizi
ISBN
978-9951-550-95-6
Location
UBT Kampus, Lipjan
Start Date
28-10-2023 8:00 AM
End Date
29-10-2023 6:00 PM
DOI
10.3107/ubt-ic.2023.32
Recommended Citation
Dara, Frederik; Peshkopia, Ridvan; and Zefi, Violeta, "The Psychological Roots of Acquiescence and Resistance: How Personality Traits Explains Public Attitudes toward Governments’ Responses to COVID-19" (2023). UBT International Conference. 10.
https://knowledgecenter.ubt-uni.net/conference/IC/PSYY/10
The Psychological Roots of Acquiescence and Resistance: How Personality Traits Explains Public Attitudes toward Governments’ Responses to COVID-19
UBT Kampus, Lipjan
The advent of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic unleashed a plethora of government responses to that public health crisis, as well as public perceptions and reaction toward both the disease and government policies to prevent and control its spread. Emerging research in behavioral sciences is trying to explain such attitudes from various perspectives. A body of literature has tried to explain public attitudes toward both the pandemic and government measures to prevent and control it with people’s socioeconomic features such as by age, gender, race, employment status, essential worker status, income, and being a parent. Other research has focused on the effect of personality traits in people’s fear from and protection against COVID-19. Yet other research has pointed to the role of political attitudes, beliefs and orientations as explanatory factors of people’s attitudes toward both the pandemics and government policies to prevent and control it. Our efforts rest on the old yet unsettled debate on what affect human behavior. One camp emphasizes the role of situational. The other camp stresses the role of biologically-rooted personality traits, more recently formulated as the Big Five personality traits in human behavior. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and governments’ reactions against it generated a wide array of public attitudes, spanning from panic toward the disease and total obedience with governments’ measures to combat it to indifference toward the risk to open challenges against governments’ anti-Covid-19 efforts. Such a milieu would represent a nice setting and offer new opportunities to revisit the situational/environmental versus psychological debate and investigate which factors mostly affect and better explain people’s behavior both toward the pandemic and governments’ efforts to prevent and control it. We investigate the role of three sets of variables, the Big Five personality traits, political trust and socioeconomic variables to model their role on people’s attitudes toward government’s responses against COVID-19. Whereas the socioeconomic factors and the Big Five personality traits represent the two sides of the already raging situational/environmental versus psychological debate, the political trust factors represent something in the middle, since belief systems are informed from both personality traits and life experiences. Therefore, interjecting them into the debate might help to find some middle ground between the situational/environmental factors and personality traits. We test our hypotheses by relying on a random digit dialing (RDD) cellphone public opinion survey, which included an experimental research design, that we conducted in Kosovo during the fall 2020. Our experiment randomly divided respondents in two groups asking the same set of questions, with one of them asked about their attitudes government’s “protective measures” and the other one primed with “lockdowns” rather than “protective measures.” The experiment’s purpose is to investigate if there is any response difference between both sets of questions, and if yes, what role the three sets of hypothesized factors, the socioeconomic, the personality and the belief system (political trust) factors play in such response differences.