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Cambridge-INET Institute   COVID-19 Economic Research

 

Using the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we explore how personality traits are associated with people’s responses when confronting the Covid-19 crisis. Our study shows that people who have symptoms related to Covid-19 are prone to high levels of neuroticism, extraversion and openness to experience. We also find people with high scores of agreeableness have lower monthly earnings, a greater chance of being furloughed and fewer opportunities to work from home. When it comes to home production activities, more agreeable family members bear more burden of the household chores and childcare responsibilities.

 

Data

The big five personality traits are the best accepted and most used model of personality in academic. While there seem to be unlimited personality variables, researchers used a technique called factor analysis and proposed five fundamental underlying traits that make up an individual’s overall personality (Digman, 1990; Goldberg, 1993; McCrae and Costa, 2008):

 

  • openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)

  • conscientiousness (efficient/organised vs. extravagant/careless)

  • extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)

  • agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/callous)

  • neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)

 

The big five traits are also commonly known by the acronym OCEAN. Within each of its five dimensions, there is a spectrum ranging from extremely high to extremely low.

This study takes advantage of the data from the Understanding Society survey in the UK, the successor of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) (University of Essex, 2010, 2014). Since 2009 almost 50,000 households and 100,000 individuals have been interviewed on an annual basis. The survey covers all regions of the UK and is nationally representative. In wave 3 of the study (2011–2013), there is a self-completion module relating to the Big Five personality traits. In the 2020 COVID-19 special survey, there is information on various daily activities during April and May of this year.

 

How do personality traits affect a person’s chances of getting infected?

People were asked the question “Have you experienced symptoms that could be caused by coronavirus (COVID-19)” in the COVID-19 survey. We will use this question to study the association between personality traits and the probability of getting symptoms related to COVID-19 in this section. We group respondents by their values of personality traits and report the fraction of individuals with positive answers in each group. Figure 1 compares the answers from individuals from top 20% and individuals from the bottom 20% of each personality traits. It indicates that a person who reports having these symptoms is more likely to score high on neuroticism, extraversion and openness to experience.

In relation to these personality traits, the explanation for the correlation between extraversion and having symptoms is likely to be the most straightforward one; As extraversion refers to how outgoing and sociable a person is, an extraverted person would be more difficulty for obeying the protective social distancing measure, which leads to a higher probability of getting infected. This argument is also in line with the evidence reported by Lucus et al. (2020). They surveyed a sample consisted of 715 Brazilian adults online found that people who are more concerned with social distance tend to be less extroverted.

 

Figure 1: The probability of having coronavirus-related symptoms

Figure 1: The probability of having coronavirus-related symptoms

Souces: The COVID-19 special survey, the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Wave 3 self-completion module for the Big Five personality measures. Note: * indicates a statistically significant difference between top 20% and bottom 20%; p < 0.05

 

How do personality traits affect job opportunities during the pandemic?

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, there have been two main important changes in the UK labour market. First, the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (otherwise known as the furlough scheme) enables furloughed workers across the UK to receive 80% of their current salary, up to £2,500, without having to work. As shown in Figure 2, nearly 20 per cent of employed workers have been placed on the furlough scheme by the end of May 2020.

 

Figure 2: Employment status during the COVID-19 crisis

Figure 2: Employment status during the COVID-19 crisis

Souces: COVID-19 special survey, the UK Household Longitudinal Study

 

Second, there has been a surge in the popularity of working from home. As shown in Figure 3, the fraction of workers who always work from home increases from 4% before the pandemic, to 39% during the pandemic. Among those workers who had never worked from home before the pandemic, 26.4% said they are frequently now working from home (the middle pie chart in Figure 3).

 

Figure 3: Working from home before and during the COVID-19 crisis

Figure 3: Working from home before and during the COVID-19 crisis

Souces: COVID-19 special survey, the UK Household Longitudinal Study

 

In the next step, we further investigate the heterogeneous responses for workers with different personality traits to these labour market changes. The literature has started to recognise the importance of personality traits in explaining the labour market success (Nyhus and Pons, 2005; Heineck, 2011; Mueller and Plug, 2006; Fletcher, 2013; Caliendo et al., 2015). More recently, one study develops and estimates a job search and bargaining model and identify agreeableness as the most important personality trait in determining the gender wage gap, through its impact on bargaining power difference between genders (Flinn, Todd and Zhang, 2020). As women are on average more agreeable than men, they are more likely to have less bargaining power and receive lower wages.

We confirm the importance of agreeableness in explaining the heterogenous reactions to pandemic in Figure 4. The left panel reports workers’ monthly earnings by their genders and their scores in agreeableness. Whilst male workers earn more than female workers in general, workers who are high in agreeableness earn significantly less than those low in agreeableness. Regarding the probability of being furloughed (the middle panel), workers high in agreeableness are more likely to be placed on the furlough scheme. The differences in the probability of being furloughed between high-agreeableness and low-agreeableness groups are more substantial for females. When it comes to the chances of working from home (the right panel), only female workers are significantly different from each other. 45.8% of less-agreeable females can work from home, but conversely, only 29.3% of more-agreeable females (top 20% group) are able to do so at this time.

 

Figure 4: Working from home before and during the COVID-19 crisis

Figure 4: Working from home before and during the COVID-19 crisis

Souces: COVID-19 special survey, the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Wave 3 self-completion module for the Big Five personality measures. Notes: * indicates a statistically significant difference between low and high agreeableness; p < 0.05.

 

How do personality traits affect home production activities?

Another evident change during pandemic is the surge of household chores and home-schooling demands, as suggested in Figure 5. Before the pandemic, women disproportionately take responsibilities of household chores as well as childcare and home-schooling. They on average spend 6 hours more on housework and 2 hours more on childcare per week. Coronavirus is exacerbating the gender gap as women bear the brunt of childcare responsibilities and home-schooling during lockdown: they spend approximately 29 hours on childcare and home-schooling per week, in contrast to only 15 hours before the COVID-19 crisis.

 

Figure 5: Time spent on home production activities

Figure 5: Time spent on home production activities

Souces: COVID-19 special survey, the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Childcare and home-schooling is conditioning on the existence of dependent children under fifteen.

 

When it comes to the question how people with different personality traits response to the excess housework time, one study finds that agreeableness is the most important determinant of household labour divisions (Flinn, Todd and Zhang, 2018). They find spouses with low scores of agreeableness are associated with lower bargaining weights, which lead to more time investment on home production responsibilities.

We find consistent data patterns in the UK Household Longitudinal Study in Figure 6. Women on average bear much more of the burden of child care and housework. Among the same gender, more-agreeable individuals always invest more time in their home production activities than less-agreeable individuals. Specifically, highly agreeable females are spending three hours more on housework, childcare and home-schooling, compared to females with low agreeableness.

 

Figure 6: The association between agreeableness and time spent on chores and childcare

Figure 6: The association between agreeableness and time spent on chores and childcare

Souces: COVID-19 special survey, the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Childcare and home-schooling is conditioning on the existence of dependent children under fifteen. Notes: * indicates a statistically significant difference between low and high agreeableness; p < 0.05.

 

What else do we need to know?

Working from home arrangement and furlough scheme have blurred the line between external labour supply and internal home production activities. What remains unclear is how constraints in one market may affect choices in the other market. For example, whether an agreeable female worker could be more likely to be dismissed or forced to take the furlough scheme because she is being taken advantage of by her husband.

One way to tackle this challenge is to develop a unified model in which individuals can bargain with their employers and spouses simultaneously. The model serves two purposes: on the one hand, it will provide insight into the overall importance of agreeableness in both markets, and on the other hand, it will shed some light on how a deliberate labour market policy should take its externalities involving family members into consideration.

 

References

Caliendo, M., Cobb-Clark, D. A., & Uhlendorff, A. (2015). Locus of control and job search strategies. Review of Economics and Statistics, 97(1), 88-103.

Carvalho, Lucas de F., Pianowski, Giselle, & Gonçalves, André P.. (2020). Personality differences and COVID-19: are extroversion and conscientiousness personality traits associated with engagement with containment measures?. Trends in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Epub April 09, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1590/2237-6089-2020-0029

Digman, J. M. (1990). Personality structure: Emergence of the five-factor model. Annual review of psychology, 41(1), 417-440.

Fletcher, D., & Sarkar, M. (2013). Psychological resilience: A review and critique of definitions, concepts, and theory. European psychologist, 18(1), 12.

Flinn, C. J., Todd, P. E., & Zhang, W. (2018). Personality traits, intra-household allocation and the gender wage gap. European Economic Review, 109, 191-220.

Flinn, C. J., Todd, P. E., & Zhang, W. (2020). Personality Traits, Job Search and the Gender Wage Gap. Working Papers 2020-010, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.

Goldberg, L. R. (1993). The structure of phenotypic personality traits. American psychologist, 48(1), 26.

Heineck, G. (2011). Does it pay to be nice? Personality and earnings in the United Kingdom. ILR Review, 64(5), 1020-1038.

McCrae, R. R., & Costa Jr, P. T. (2008). The five-factor theory of personality.

Mueller, G., & Plug, E. (2006). Estimating the effect of personality on male and female earnings. ILR Review, 60(1), 3-22.

Nyhus, E. K., & Pons, E. (2005). The effects of personality on earnings. Journal of economic psychology, 26(3), 363-384.

 


Xiaomeng Li and Dr. Weilong Zhang

About the authors
Xiaomeng Li is a MPhil student at the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge. Her research interests lie in the field of Labor Economics, Family Economics, Human Capital.

Dr. Weilong Zhang is a University Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge. His current research focuses on the role of personality traits in determining individuals' decisions both in the labour market and within households. He also has broad interests in the evaluation of labour market policies.