Author response of: Personality traits predict perception of pandemic risk and compliance with infection control measures. Round#1

There has been considerable investigation into the links between personality characteristics and behaviour during pandemics.Trait activation theory (Tett et al, 2021) suggests that personality traits will be associated with behaviour when the situation is relevant to the expression of these traits.For instance, during a pandemic when adhering to medical advice and infection control is crucial, we would expect conscientiousness to be a positive predictor.In the current study, Saetrevik et al. (2025) examined which personality traits from the BIG 5 (openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism) predicted compliance to health precautions (e.g.handwashing and physical distancing) and perceived risk during COVID-19.Data were collected from the Norwegian Citizen Panel.Personality measures were taken before the pandemic and measures of risk and compliance were taken during the pandemic (N=3,223 after matching).Based on previous literature, the authors proposed a series of directional hypotheses regarding the links between different measures of personality and outcomes (e.g.there will be a positive association between conscientiousness and compliance) and tested them with two linear regressions (including all five personality measures predicting risk and compliance).Overall, the results were mixed with conscientiousness and agreeableness positively predicting compliance, but extraversion, openness and neuroticism exhibiting no reliable association.For perceived risk, neuroticism was a positive predictor, and in exploratory analyses agreeableness was a negative predictor.Overall, these findings improve our understanding of how personality characteristics might impact individuals behaviour during pandemic responses.The Stage 2 manuscript underwent two rounds of review from two reviewers and the recommender.Based on detailed responses to the reviewers' comments, the 1 recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 2 criteria and awarded a positive recommendation.URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/p5sjbLevel of bias control achieved: Level 1.At least some of the data/evidence that was used to the answer the research question had been accessed and observed by the authors prior to Stage 1 in-principle acceptance, including key variables, but the authors certify that they had not yet performed any of their preregistered analyses, and in addition they took stringent steps to reduce the risk of bias.List of eligible PCI RR-friendly