Big Five, Dark Triad, and Face Masks The Role of Personality in Reducing the Spread of COVID-19

Face masks are an effective method to reduce the spread of COVID-19, but many people are reluctant to wear them. Recent authors have called for studies of personality to determine which people may have particularly negative face mask perceptions and reduced face mask wearing. In the current article, we assess the relation of the Big Five and Dark Triad with face mask perceptions and wearing. We apply a four-wave longitudinal research design collected via MTurk (n = 209, M-age = 36.97 years, 50% female, 85% American), and we use the eight-dimension Face Mask Perceptions Scale to test mediating mechanisms between personality and behavior. When tested together, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism did not have notable relations with perceptions or wearing; openness and the Dark Triad had significant relations with face mask perceptions, and agreeableness had significant indirect effects on face mask wearing via perceptions. These results indicate that personality does relate to face mask perceptions and behaviors. We call on future research to conduct facet-level studies of personality with face mask perceptions and behaviors to ascertain the cause of these observed relations, further identify the importance of specific face mask perceptions, and integrate personality into models of health behaviors.