Personality-led irrational behavior during the coronavirus pandemic

[a327ex]

This year has been extremely interesting so far. I've been following the coronavirus story since early January and it has been instructive to watch people's reactions as they learn about it. The thing that has fascinated me the most though has been the level to which irrational behavior has been normalized across the entire political spectrum. While I expected some of this to be the case when the virus was just starting and some leaders decided to make the issue political, I didn't expect the amount of irrationality would be this big. So in this article I'll focus on these irrational behaviors and how they can be explained by people's personalities.

Low agreeableness + high conscientiousness

The first instance I noticed of highly irrational behavior from otherwise rational people started with people protesting against lockdowns. This seemed to be stronger in the US but there are a lot of them in Brazil and other places too. Politically this group is a combination of libertarians and conservatives. Personality-wise, libertarians are lower in agreeableness and conscientiousness than both conservatives and liberals and as high in openness as liberals, who are higher in it than conservatives.

In a way, libertarians are much closer to liberals than to conservatives, except for the fact that they value individual liberty and freedom above most other things. Their extremely low agreeableness makes them less empathetic and more cautious, more rational and less emotional, and their low conscientiousness makes them more wary of authority. All of these traits contribute to them valuing individual life less than freedom, and being more strongly against things like government mandated lockdowns.

Sometimes it's hard to truly grasp the degree to which they value freedom, but from what I've seen the exercise that makes the most sense to me is this: picture the video of George Floyd being killed - it's a video that fills anyone with disgust, and it's no wonder people had such a strong reaction to it. I would argue that libertarians feel a similar kind of disgust whenever they see someone being arrested for being outside during a lockdown. It's an aggression on their most important values that fills them with righteous rage and which leads them to action.

Interestingly, this group is also high in openness, so they were more likely to follow the virus from early on, and they also probably represent a higher percentage of "prepper" types who stocked up on food and built apocalypse bunkers and stuff like that. Additionally, their high openness and low agreeableness combined makes them more likely to support more conspirational and unpopular ideas such as vaccines not working, but I'll drill down more on this later.

The other group that is also against lockdowns are conservatives. Conservatives are higher in conscientiousness than liberals and libertarians and in this instance they represent both industry and business but also Trump's/Bolsonaro's revolutionary tendencies. One thing that is very interesting about current conservatives in both the US and Brazil (where I identified the biggest anti-lockdown protests, and consequently the both countries with the most cases and deaths in the world) is that they're not conservatives at all. Both of them represent a kind of revolutionary "conservatism", in that they're more interested in the process of change from left-led rule rather than in actually acting like conservatives should act.

Why do I bring this up? Because things like viruses are biologically the reason why a conservative personality exists. Conservatives have higher disgust responses to foreign entities, and this is good because often times contact with foreign entities spells doom for your society - think of how 90%+ of native Americans died due to disease once Europeans landed here.

And in the case of a virus, you'd expect conservatives to take the issue more seriously than liberals, but due to the fact that the leaders are revolutionaries interested in change rather than in conservation and prudent action, the part of current conservatism that is high in industriousness but not as high in orderliness (which is what drives disgust responses) will join the protests, while the other parts won't and will quietly disapprove of their leaders, which explains both Trump's and Bolsonaro's decrease in popularity.

This mix of pro-liberty and pro-business personalities resulted in quite a lot of irrational behavior during the earlier months of the pandemic in both the US and Brazil. It strikes me as especially interesting how there are lots of arguments from this group justifying the non-adherence to lockdowns, even including people who are supposedly hyper-rational like Elon Musk and this is just more evidence to me that people are just way more driven by their personalities than they'd like to admit. (although in Musk's case he's also a businessman who needs to make money, so probably not the best example...)

High agreeableness

After the lockdown protests there was the death of George Floyd and the protests that followed. I categorize the supporters of these protests as high agreeableness agreeable people are more empathetic, value kindness, fairness and inclusion above all and most of the people who identify strongly with social justice issues around women, minorities, trans people, and so on, are like this.

Just like the libertarians who value liberty and freedom and are enraged by government mandated lockdowns, the people who will get the most enraged by the death of George Floyd will be those who are high in agreeableness. And here you see the same kind of irrationality where the values most important to these individuals win over the reality of the pandemic.

There are three different points to make about this group: one about the religious nature of their existence and why it's so religious; one about how these protests often become violent and destructive and how that helps the right; and another about the negatives of high agreeableness.

The first point is interesting but it has been better approached in videos like this one so I'll skip it here. The second point can be quickly summarized as: conservative people like order and dislike change more strongly than liberals - the pandemic is already a fairly new situation that requires a lot of effort out of them, and adding on top of that these protests with their increased violence and continued toppling of various statues only serves to further increase the disgust response of conservatives. More importantly though, the protests give conservatives a tangible group to blame for these problems, whereas before the hatred had to be focused on the virus itself or China by proxy (which are weakers arguments when it comes to the upcoming election), now they can focus mostly on the left. So from a logical point of view these protests are also not politically helpful.

For the third point, most people in society today don't understand that every personality trait has its disadvantages and that includes agreeableness. People often think that empathy and compassion are always good and that people who lack those attributes are always bad because they aren't nice. In the context of gaming I think a game that exemplifies this really well is Undertale, which is a very high agreeableness game, where even the low agreeableness route (genocide) and its conclusions are framed exclusively from the point of view of the high agreeableness author to be consumed by a high agreeableness player.

The first problem of high agreeableness is that people like this want to avoid conflict at all costs. One of the really good ways to tell if you're high in it or not if is you've ever found it hard to say "no" to people after they ask you to do something for them. A way of conceptualizing this is the following: imagine that every interaction between people is composed of trades. A person with normal levels of agreeableness will interact with others and will try to maintain some kind of fairness to the interactions, if one trade favors you more here, I'll look for a trade that favors me more later and this will keep going and the relationship will remain balanced. However, a person who is high in agreeableness has a lot of trouble trading on their own behalf, so in every interaction they'll be looking at ways in which that interaction can favor the other person rather than themselves.

As examples, if you join up two highly agreeable people you get into those situations where each will try to outnice the other constantly. If you join up one highly agreeable person with a barely agreeable person you'll essentially have latter taking advantage of the former. And if you join up two barely agreeable people you will have each fighting for their own interests in the relationship and not letting the other person gain free advantages.

The problems of this aspect of high agreeableness should be obvious: people like this are less likely to stand up for themselves (and often times they don't even know what they themselves actually want, since their entire frame of the world is based on their relationships with others), more likely to be taken advantage of and more likely to let issues bubble up until a point of no return, as they don't like conflict and they will want to avoid hard discussions at all costs. In the context of these protests, people who are higher in agreeableness will find it impossible to utter any kind of disagreement, despite whatever ones they might have. The circuit of assertive conflict just isn't there, and without those kinds of breaks situations involving groups of highly agreeable people will quickly get out of control.

The primary reason why I think most of these protests are easily turned violent is this. I've watched a ton of these streams and I have seen many examples of the following: the protest is peaceful, but one or two people start being more aggressive and trying to break things, sometimes someone tells them to stop and they do, but most of the times people just look and no one steps up to say anything. You repeat this process enough times and in a matter of minutes you can go from something peaceful to something violent, because as the agitators aren't stopped by anyone the police has to step in, and then because everyone is against the police they automatically react to the police reacting, and so on.

Here's a concrete example in a single stream:

• Up to this point (6+ hours) the protest is peaceful and people gather in front of a fence
• Eventually someone starts moving the fence more forcefully
• This continues for a few more minutes
• And then a few people really start going hard at it. Notice how most people simply move away and only one girl gets the guys doing it to stop
• But only a minute later everyone is back at it again
• And finally, the police starts shooting and the rest is history

This is just one example. I've watched so many streams where the absolute same series of events happens in different situations, from people trying to break into or burn stores, throw bricks at cars or the police, and so on. The point is, in a group primarily moved by inclusion, the exclusion of any undesirable behavior becomes harder to achieve, except if that behavior is exclusion itself.

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This brings me to my next problem with high agreeableness: sectarianism. Women are on average higher in agreeableness than men likely because they need to care for infants, evolutionarily speaking. And you could argue that this trait exists in the way it does precisely for taking care of infants while they're vulnerable. One of the things about infants is that they're always right, and ANYTHING that tries to threaten the infant in any way is simply wrong. The problem with this is that adults are not infants, and so this mindset doesn't work well in broader society.

The way this manifests itself in broader society is that people higher in agreeableness are always looking for the in-group which they must protect (the baby), and the out-group which they must protect against (the snake). Currently in society the way this plays out is that the new religion dominated by high agreeableness individuals will also try to constantly identify in-groups and out-groups. Women, minorities, trans people, for instance, are the in-group which must be protected, and men, whites and cis people, are the out-group which must be protected against. More interestingly, despite agreeableness being about empathy and compassion, in the same way that if a snake is threatening a baby you'll want to kill it, for high agreeableness individuals, once they identify their metaphorical snake, their drive will also be to completely destroy it.

The amount of fury and rage that can be unleashed at the out-group individual is unmatched. In effect, the out-group individual is seem as not a human being and so it's completely OK to use any means necessary to destroy him. You see this in practice in a more soft way with cancel culture generally, but in the protests themselves you can also see it with the many examples of people who just get beat up for being potentially identified as a member of the out-group, and more interestingly by people who are already dead and who are also identified as a member of the out-group (click image below to see video):

This much agreeableness and all its effects, combined with George Floyd's horrible death, and then also combined with months of lockdown, contributed a lot to the huge amounts of irrational behavior seen during these protests. As I was watching this happen I became fully convinced that people are completely driven by their personalities and everything else they do is a posterior rationalization.

It's kind of sad too, because as the months passed and the first people to act irrationally were conservatives/libertarians, I could palpably feel myself moving to the left. If I were American I would have voted for Trump in 2016, and in 2018 I voted for Bolsonaro here in Brazil. As I watched both of them completely miss the mark on their coronavirus responses (and in the case of Bolsonaro he has also been fucking up hard on various other areas), as well as people on the right acting completely irrationally by protesting lockdowns, I became shocked at what I voted into power and I was in the process of really deeply re-analyzing my premises, especially my view towards agreeableness.

I've always thought that too much agreeableness/empathy was the primary problem of current society, but as the pandemic progressed it became increasingly clear that all these people protesting against lockdowns were acting like sociopaths who didn't care at all about other people's lives. And if this was the case and these people were so numerous, then too much agreeableness couldn't possibly be the main problem. This was aided by the fact that during the worst of the pandemic in the US all social justice issues basically had died down completely. I think from January to early May, so 5 months in total, the number of social justice related stories I would read on the Internet dropped dramatically. Everyone seemed to be focused on a real problem for once and that was good.

Obviously this all was thrown away once these police protests started. Social justice issues and cancel culture came back with a lot more force, and it reminded me why I would have voted for Trump and voted for Bolsonaro in the first place. In 2020 though I wouldn't vote for Trump, and Bolsonaro is about to be impeached (which is good), but I wouldn't vote for him either in 2022. The irrationality on both sides of the debate has become very clear to me now and I find myself looking at how various countries handled this pandemic and the political orientation of the leaders that handled it well doesn't really seem to matter, all that seems to matter is how functional the country is and how competent the leaders are, and I'm not sure you can pin those factors down to ideology.

High extroversion

Another group that displays irrational behavior are extroverts. The meaning in these people's lives comes from contact with other people, so the idea of lockdowns really destroy them. If you're reading this blog you're probably a creative person, which corresponds to having high openness. People who are high in openness simply can't stop being creative, and if they're in a situation where they can't exercise their creativity they will just get depressed. Similarly, people who are highly extroverted feel the same way if they can't meet other people.

There's really not much to say about extroverts other than the fact that like both previous groups, their personality commands and the rationalizations come after. There is a group of people on the planet who absolutely cannot handle 2-3 months of having no contact with other human beings, and so you get things like this (click to watch):

There are dozens of examples of parties like this going on everywhere in the world, even in countries where case numbers are still going up (like in Brazil). It's easy to try to look at this and say that all these people are stupid or uninformed, but that's unlikely. What's more likely is that they know the risks very well but their body commands them to do what their body wants, and so they do it. They're not more illogical than the lockdown protesters or the police protesters, which is to say that they're all equally illogical.

Low openness

This one is the opposite of someone creative. People lower in openness don't like change and take longer to adapt to new situations. I've spoken about this in terms of games before too, for instance, roguelikes are games made for people who are higher in openness because you're always encountering new situations and you have to quickly adapt to them. People low in openness generally won't like roguelikes, just like they won't like the concept of something they can't see (the virus) that dramatically alters their lives.

There's not much to say about this group either, other than that this is what fuels a lot of people who seem to be completely in denial about it. While extroverts understand the risks and they just don't care, it's more likely for low openness people to just deny the virus completely for one simple reason: hospitals run out of space with a fairly low percentage of the population infected, meaning that lockdowns are necessary before you can see anyone around you actually getting sick. By the time you're seeing people get sick consistently it's already too late and many people have died without being able to have access to proper care. So it's a tricky situation that just feeds into people's biases a lot.

High openness + low agreeableness

Finally, the last group. This group represents people who are high in divergent/creative thinking, who enjoy conflict, and who use reason and logic more than other personality types. They are close to libertarians temperamentally except for low conscientiousness. You could also call this a group of contrarians. The high openness leads them to wild theories, the low agreeableness makes them seek out confrontation. In the context of the pandemic they'll be the ones more likely to believe theories of conspiratorial nature of all sorts like: vaccines don't work, masks don't work, Bill Gates wants to vaccinate everyone and chip them to control the world, the virus doesn't even exist it's all fake, deaths numbers are being inflated, China released the virus on purpose, the CIA released the virus on purpose, aliens released the virus to prepare us for an invasion, the cabal of global banks wants to bankrupt all small businesses to gain control over the world's finances via one global currency and rule for eternity, 5G creates the virus, it's all a plan of the demonic vampire pedophile forces of evil who want to destroy humanity...

I don't feel like I have to spend much time convincing you about the irrationality of this group, so like a true contrarian that I am I'll do the opposite. I'm temperamentally a part of this group and I personally enjoy being a contrarian. There is inherent value in looking precisely where others won't look and not really caring about potentially being wrong. Plus, for a creative person, reading about all these crazy theories is kind of fun. If you watch the video below and you can't imagine an amazing story alongside it then IMO your imagination is lacking (click to watch):

For the pandemic itself most of the wild theories that were going around in January and February have been proven wrong (there's only 1 crazy theory that's still up in the air if it's true or not (if it is a lot more people will die), but I'm paying attention to all the data and I'll warn you if it is 😃) and most of the mainstream information available is right. Overall though this group can do a lot of damage. There's sooooo much misinformation around these conspiracies that can be disproved with just a little bit of thought that I really feel hopeless for humanity when I see so many people repeating the same conspiracy despite it being obvious how wrong it is. A good example is the one about Bill Gates:

This image is shared A LOT in conspiracy theory circles. The quote is something that Bill Gates actually said, but when you listen to it in context:

It's clear what he actually means. He means that if you vaccinate people in poor countries and child mortality drops, you have a subsequent decrease in birth rates. This is a well known fact that I remember learning in school, where birth rates are higher in places where child mortality is higher because humans switch to a kind of replacement mode where if you know a lot of your children will die you need to have a lot of children in the first place so some of them can survive. I can see how people wouldn't know about this fact and because of the way Bill Gates speaks, slightly omitting the fact because he assumes the audience knows it, you get A TON of people, who even watching this in context, can't parse what Bill Gates is saying and instead parse that he actually means "kill people with vaccines".

The problematic effect that these kinds of things have in society, especially during a moment of pandemic, is huge. There have been lots of wrong theories created by this group during this pandemic that is then used as justification by the other groups so that they can break quarantines and go outside, which is sad because it makes everything worse...

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Anyway, this is all I wanted to say. This year has been very instructive and it has solidified my view that this model of personality is extremely useful in mapping the behavior of the crowd. In the context of game development this model seems like it would be a really good guide to make sure that your game hits well with the personalities you want to focus on, kinda like Undertale focused on high agreeableness and did a stellar job for those kinds of people.

[whynne]

Excellent essay. Deserves to be signal boosted.

[SoulboundMalady]

Interesting read. Some of the points seem consistent with some studies I've read on the matter. But I couldn't find studies or data for other things. Could you please share your sources (for example of the tables) as you sparked my interest and I want to follow up on this and plunge down the rabbit hole!

[a327ex]

Tables are from this https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1665934, but you can find similar studies if you search "big five politics" or similar. There are various more robust and more cited papers than this one. I also recommend the lectures starting here until the end of the course, he goes over all this in some detail and gives you lots of sources.