Women's greater compliance levels with preventive health behaviours could, at least in part, be attributed to their higher agreeableness and conscientiousness scores

Pandemic Prevention and Personality Psychology: Gender Differences in Preventive Health Behaviors during COVID-19 and the Roles of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. Tobias Otterbring, Alexandra Festila. Journal of Safety Science and Resilience, November 30 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnlssr.2021.11.003

Abstract: One of greatest public health crises in recent times, the COVID-19 pandemic, has come with a myriad of challenges in terms of health communication and public cooperation to prevent the spread of the disease. Understanding which are the key determinants that make certain individuals more cooperative is key in effectively tackling pandemics and similar future challenges. In the present study (N = 800), we investigated whether gender differences in compliance with preventive health behaviors (PHB) at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic could be established, and, if so, whether the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness can help explain this presumed relationship. Consistent with our theorizing, we found women to score higher than men on agreeableness and conscientiousness, and to be more willing to comply with a set of PHB. Importantly, both personality traits were found to mediate the gender-compliance link. This means that women's greater compliance levels with PHB could, at least in part, be attributed to their higher agreeableness and conscientiousness scores. A greater understanding of the determinants of PHB in terms of gender and associated personality traits may help identify options for developing more effective communication campaigns, both in terms of communication channel selection and message content.

Keywords: COVID-19pandemicsgender, personalitypsychologyagreeablenessconscientiousnesspreventive health behaviors

DISCUSSION

In the present research, we investigated potential gender differences in individuals’ compliance with a set of preventive health measures (i.e., social distancing, wearing a face mask, hand hygiene), as introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, we examined whether the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness mediated the role of the hypothesized gender differences in shaping compliance responses. Consistent with our theorizing and previous related research, we found women to score higher than men on agreeableness and conscientiousness, and to be more willing to comply with the preventive health measures studied herein. Importantly, both personality traits were found to mediate the gender-compliance link. Thus, women's greater compliance levels withing the realm of preventive health measures during a public health crisis can, at least in part, be attributed to their higher agreeableness and conscientiousness scores.

Previous research has consistently reported that men appear to be less compliant with multiple PHB. Accordingly, they are generally less likely to engage in self-care techniques when they are sick (e.g., staying in bed), less likely to have regular screenings and check-ups (e.g., for cholesterol, blood pressure, cancer), and less likely to follow preventive treatments (e.g., take medicine for blood pressure), just to name a few examples (for a review, see [13]). There are numerous theories as to why such gender-differentiated patterns emerge, including traditional gender roles and men's perceived invulnerability to risk [14, 16]. Building on previous studies reporting gender differences in agreeableness and conscientiousness [2, 15, 28, 31, 51, 53], our study indicates that such differences in personality could at least partially explain behavioral patterns of this type. Indeed, agreeableness is a dimension associated with maintenance of positive interpersonal relations and conflict avoidance [27], characteristics that might explain a tendency to perform normative behaviors (e.g., compliance with preventive behaviors). As for conscientiousness, certain self-regulatory processes associated with this personality trait (e.g., the ability to control one's behavior and to perform a given task) could aid the performance of otherwise aversive behaviors, including compliance with health behaviors [36], as examined herein.

Although our obtained effect sizes were typically small to moderate by conventional standards [19, 21], our results may still have practical implications. In fact, the strengths of our relationships are at least as strong as the link between extraversion test scores and success in sales or between antihistamine use and reduced sneezing [33]. Thus, multiply our obtained gender differences by the number of men and women in the world and bear in mind the ease with which brief measures of personality traits can be collected, and it should become evident why the current findings are relevant (cf. [42]). For example, a greater understanding of the determinants of PHB in terms of gender and associated personality traits may help identify options for developing more targeted communication campaigns, both in terms of communication channel selection and message content.

One suggestion for future research, which could not be addressed in the current investigation given our country characteristics, is to test whether the gender difference in compliance would be greater in more gender egalitarian countries. Because the gender equality paradox indicates that the greatest gender differences in personality traits and other important aspects of social life exist in the most gender egalitarian cultures (e.g., [7, 10]; Costa et al., 2001; [18, 31, 37, 50, 51, 54]), future research could test whether such findings also extend to compliance with preventive health measures during global health crises.

In closing, some potential limitations should be acknowledged. The present study recruited participants through a crowdsourced online platform without asking questions about participants’ educational, occupational, or socioeconomic status. While a critic may therefore question the representativeness and quality of our data, it should be noted that online panel studies are typically 1) more representative than studies based on other common sample types [8, 22, 43, 46], and 2) often yield comparable or higher data quality when compared to that obtained through traditional samples [5, 25, 44, 48]. Moreover, Prolific participants frequently outperform other online panels in terms of data quality on aspects such as attention, comprehension, and reliability [17]. In fact, even non-probabilistic online panel responses have been shown to generate data quality comparable to face-to-face survey responses by means of reliability and validity [49]. Recent meta-analytic evidence further indicates that online panel data have similar psychometric properties with respect to internal reliability estimates for scales and effect size estimates for the relationships between independent and dependent variables, while simultaneously producing “criterion validities that generally fall within the credibility intervals of existing meta-analytic results from conventionally sourced data” ([60], p. 425). Nevertheless, future studies should optimally collect data on participants’ educational, occupational, and socioeconomic status to ensure generalizability of our results.