In 2020, many countries around the world created and enforced heavy restrictions geared towards reducing the spread of the coronavirus (i.e., COVID-19). In this study (N = 263), we examined the role of personality traits (i.e., Big Five and Dark Triad) and individual differences in perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic situation (the situational eight: Duty, Intellect, Adversity, Mating, Positivity, Negativity, Deception, and Sociality) in accounting for individual differences in compliance with the governmental restrictions in Poland. We found that the way people perceived the situation explained more variance in compliance than personality traits which is in accordance with the hypothesis that strong situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, leave less room for dispositional tendencies in predicting behaviors than situational cues. Moreover, people scoring low on agreeableness and high on aspects of the Dark Triad traits (i.e., Machiavellianism, psychopathy Factor 1, and narcissistic rivalry) were less likely to comply with the restrictions. Additionally, we replicated and extended what is known about the associations between personality and individual differences in the perception of situations when the latter were assessed in relation to a strong situation and the former were assessed with long and multidimensional measures.
This work was supported by the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, from the funds awarded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in the form of a subsidy for the maintenance and development of research potential in 2020 (501-D125-01-1250000 zlec. 5011000235) awarded to the first author. The second author was partially funded by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (PPN/ULM/2019/1/00019/U/00001).
