You’ve probably felt it. More than two years into the coronavirus pandemic, the world just feels all-round grumpier. Misanthropic. Maybe even antisocial. People get into fights on airplanes, drive wildly. We all have a little less time for one another’s nonsense. It’s the prickling sense that someone might snap at you at any moment — or that you might do the snapping.
Well, you’re not wrong. New research published in the journal PLOS One finds that the personalities of Americans have, in fact, changed. They’ve gotten more unpleasant. We’re more argumentative, less diligent in our home and work lives, less likely to strike up a conversation with a stranger or call an old friend, and less excited about new things. COVID-19 turned us into jerks.
At first glance, that might seem too obvious to spend research grant money on. Well, duh, of course our nerves are frayed after what we’ve all been through. But the thing is, personality characteristics don’t usually change that fast. And even weirder, natural disasters aren’t supposed to turn us into agitated monsters. In fact, for more than half a century the entire field of disaster sociology has been based on the insight that when faced with disaster, people don’t become feral looters and shotgun-wielding defenders of walled compounds. We help. We get nicer. We rush to the scene and do what we can. We do not, the theory goes, refuse to wear masks in public places during an outbreak of an airborne disease, or decline to get vaccinated even though doing so would put babies and older people at risk, or fail to provide schools with air purifiers. This disaster, for some reason, didn’t bring us together in the way that catastrophes usually do. It tore us apart.
To see how the pandemic affected us, researchers looked at the so-called Big Five personality traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness. Typically, those traits are fairly stable – that’s why they’re called the Big Five. They can get better after therapy or worse after a major life trauma, and they shift predictably from when we’re kids to when we reach get-off-my-lawn age. But the new study found a surprising shift during the pandemic — roughly equivalent to what they’d expect from 10 years of life, not two. As far as our psyches are concerned, the past couple of years have been one hell of a decade.
The findings certainly align with the anecdotal evidence we’ve all been collecting about the national decline in niceness. “Think about all the news stories last summer about how awful it was to fly and how disagreeable people were. Well, maybe this is contributing to it,” says Angelina Sutin, a behavioral scientist at Florida State University who was the lead author on the new paper. “It’s speculation. But when we look at what’s going on with mental health and these anecdotal stories collectively, it’s kind of all telling a similar story.”
Before COVID, research on disaster psychology focused mostly on mental health or post-traumatic stress. While it’s relatively simple to look at the prevalence of something like depression or anxiety, personality is different. For one thing, people are pretty bad at remembering what their personalities used to be like. So Sutin’s team used data from the Understanding America Study, a longitudinal data set of thousands of people run out of the University of Southern California. That provided them with a pre-pandemic baseline they could measure against.
What she found looks pretty convincing. The changes in Big Five personality traits her team documented were about half as large as the rise in depression and anxiety that took place during the pandemic. That, it so happens, is pretty much the same magnitude of shift you’d expect to see in someone who gets therapy. COVID, it seems, has altered us to the same degree as seeing a shrink would — albeit for the worse.
But Sutin isn’t sure the changes can be blamed on COVID alone. It’s impossible to untangle the pandemic from — well, everything. “This was an American sample, so looking at all of the events of the last two and a half years, a lot of things have been going on,” Sutin says. Black Lives Matter, January 6, record-breaking heat waves, hurricanes, soaring inflation, stock-market crashes — are you feeling depressed yet? Less agreeable? More introverted?
“We literally measured inches of water in their house,” says Rodica Damian, the University of Houston psychologist who led the Harvey study. Her team looked at how prepared people were and how badly the storm affected them. Nothing correlated. Disasters definitely turn people’s personality dials — just not all in the same direction, or by the same amount. “Different people change differently,” Damian says. “We don’t know why.”
Except Sutin’s team found consistent change for just about everyone. So what made this disaster different from almost every other disaster? The data provides a clue.
During the first months of the pandemic, Sutin’s team found little personality change. “The change we did find was a decline in neuroticism, toward being a little bit less emotional and sensitive to stress,” Sutin says. People, in other words, got emotionally stronger. “We hypothesized there was this early coming-together — ‘we need to fight the virus together.’ Having that collective response may have helped support personality in terms of other stressors pushing against it.” People were sewing masks and volunteering to bring food to people who were housebound and banging pots and pans to show their support for first responders. In the face of adversity, we did what humans do: We rallied.
But unlike other disasters, this one didn’t come and go in a few days or weeks, like a hurricane or a flood. And the longer it dragged on, the more of a toll it took on our personalities. “The only thing that went wrong,” says Brent Roberts, a psychologist and expert in personality change at the University of Illinois, “is the goddamn pandemic kept going.” In this theory, time is the unaccounted-for variable in the disaster-personality equation. Our early spirit gave way to despair. And our personalities took a turn for the worse.
On the other hand, maybe the fault isn’t in our clocks but in ourselves. In the pandemic — maybe in every disaster — only some people get helpful. “Certainly in New York City and Boston, and I assume Seattle and San Francisco and other places hit early on in COVID, people did rally together. There was a lot of public spiritedness and good will,” says David Jones, a historian of medicine at Harvard University. But other parts of the country didn’t join in. “Very quickly, whether because of the presidential campaign, or President Trump, the epidemic got politicized and polarized. That sense of ‘we’re all in this together, let’s all rally around’ fizzled.”
Historians of epidemics note that things were different during COVID’s closest rival: the influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919. For one thing, influenza didn’t stick around like COVID. Single waves cropped up in different cities and then ebbed. And back then, organizations like the American Red Cross could piggyback on the patriotic spirit of World War I to shame people into wearing masks; the word “slacker” was first used in 1918, as a pejorative to describe anti-maskers.
This is the darkest explanation of why COVID made us meaner. Disaster researchers didn’t miscalculate the effect of time — they miscalculated the effect of culture. For some Americans, the most stressful thing about the pandemic was experts telling them they should help people they don’t like.
I might even be partially to blame here. I started covering COVID in early 2020, and as soon as I learned that it was disproportionately harming poor people and people of color, I started emphasizing that fact in every story I wrote. I figured that if people knew that folks more vulnerable than them were at greater risk, they’d modulate their behavior to help.
They did not. “Disasters bring out the best in people for a short term, and when the people you are being asked to help are like you,” Jones says. “But if the disaster plays out in a way that follows lines of race or class, then I don’t know if you ever get good public sentiment.”
When San Francisco had an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900, Jones notes, the first cases were in Chinatown. Public authorities strung a rope around the neighborhood and told all the white people still inside they could leave; the Chinese people had to stay. During a smallpox outbreak in Boston in 1902, he says, “the city sent goon squads into the poor neighborhoods to do compulsory vaccination but did not do the same in wealthy neighborhoods.” At the height of the HIV epidemic, the country’s leaders basically abandoned the gay community. The list goes on.
Like all good social-science studies, Sutin’s research may have just put a name to something that was always there. COVID amplified our lesser angels. “How do you decide who’s in and who’s out?” Jones says. “Societies will often respond with great compassion to those who are within their ‘moral community’ but are loath to extend resources beyond that.” The jerks on airplanes, the anti-vax protesters, the people yelling at store clerks and waitstaff? They always felt that way. The pandemic just pushed them over the edge.
But that doesn’t mean we have to join in. Whatever chaos is unfolding on the cultural and political landscape, we can each make a choice about how to face the stress in our lives. A central tenet of personality theory is that all it takes to change a trait is small steps, diligently taken. So: Argue less. Take care of yourself and others. Call an old friend. Me, I’m still a disaster optimist. I still believe that the darkest days we face, as individuals and a nation, can ultimately bring us together rather than drive us apart. Meanness will ultimately regress to the mean. It just takes work — and some time.
Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Insider
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