Individuals steadily have grown less conscientiousness and more neurotic since the beginning of the pandemic

Berg, Cameron. 2022. “Personality Trends over the COVID-19 Pandemic.” PsyArXiv. June 8. doi:10.31234/osf.io/9mu46

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has exhibited significant psychological and behavioral impacts, but a precise account of the way that the pandemic has altered human personality is still highly uncertain. This investigation leverages a dataset of Five Factor Model (“Big Five”) personality results from 2.8-million US adults recorded throughout the duration of the pandemic in order to better understand the relationship between significant COVID-19 trends and population-level trait measurements. Using ordinary correlational and more sophisticated machine learning (ML) techniques, we find that (1) individuals steadily have grown less conscientious and more neurotic since the beginning of the pandemic, that (2) average population-level measures of trait agreeableness increased most strongly in response to shorter-term, transient worsening of the pandemic (e.g., hospitalization spikes), while average population-level measures of trait neuroticism increased most strongly in response to longer-term, cumulative worsening of the pandemic (e.g., total deaths), that (3) average population-level measures of trait openness significantly decreased in response to the shorter-term, transient worsening of the pandemic, and that (4) on average, ML-generated regression models were able to explain approximately half of the variance in population-level trait trajectories solely given regressors associated with the course of the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., the number of people admitted into the ICU for COVID-19 on a given day of the pandemic). Taken together, these findings are among the first to suggest that, at the population level, the COVID-19 pandemic exhibited specific, measurable, and durable impacts on human personality.