To comply or not to comply: a latent profile analysis of behaviors and attitudes during a COVID-19 pandemic

Citation: Kleitman S, Fullerton DJ, Zhang LM, Blanchard MD, Lee J, Stankov L, et al. (2021) To comply or not to comply: a latent profile analysis of behaviors and attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic. PLoS ONE 16(7): e 0255268. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0255268

Commentary

This study identified complex patterns of compliance and integrated multiple psychological paradigms and epidemiology to comprehensively investigate underlying psychological differences.

The study included 1575 participants from Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and showed early pandemic behavior, attitudes, personality, cognitive/decision-making abilities, resilience, adaptability, coping, political and cultural factors, and information consumption.

Using latent profile analysis, two broad groups were identified.

The results showed that the compliant group (90%) reported greater concern and perceived protective measures to be effective. Conversely, the non-compliant group (about 10%) was found to perceive problems.

The non-compliant group showed lower levels of cooperation and cultural closeness and laxity, but were more outgoing and reactive. They were shown to utilize more maladaptive coping strategies, check/trust the news less, and use less official sources of information. In terms of gender differences, women have been found to show higher compliance than men.

In summary, this study examines the characteristics of those who do and do not comply with norms during a pandemic, when behavior change is a given. Those who do not comply are less cooperative and have lower levels of cultural closeness and laxity. However, they were shown to be more extroverted in personality traits and also more reactive.

And people with these traits were shown to adopt inappropriate infection control measures and not check or trust news and other information.