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The spread of COVID-19 within any given country or community at the onset of the pandemic depended in part on the sheltering-in-place rate of its citizens The pandemic led us to revisit one of psychology\'s most fundamental and most basic questions in a high-stakes context: what determines human behavior? Adopting a Lewinian interactionist lens, we investigate the independent and joint effects of macrolevel government policies and microlevel psychological factors-that is, personality-on whether individuals sheltered-in-place We analyzed data collected in late March and early April 2020 from 101,005 participants in 55 countries, a time period that coincided with the early and accelerating stage of the COVID-19 pandemic This time period also contained substantial variation in the stringency of governmental policy toward sheltering-in-place, both between countries and within each country over time Analyses revealed that personality and the stringency of governmental policies independently predicted sheltering-in-place rates Policy stringency was positively related to sheltering-in-place For the personality dimensions, Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism all predicted higher rates of sheltering-in-place, whereas Extraversion was negatively related to staying at home In addition, two personality traits-Openness to Experience and Neuroticism-interacted with governmental policy to predict whether individuals sheltered-in-place;openness and neuroticism each had weaker effects on sheltering-in-place as governmental policies became stricter Theoretically, the findings demonstrate that individual differences predict behavior (i e , sheltering-in-place) even when governments take strong action targeting that behavior Practically, they suggest that even if governments lift their shelter-in-place restrictions, some individuals will shelter-in-place less than others (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved) Impact Statement Public Significance Statement-To curb the spread of current and recurrent waves of COVID-19, individuals must stay at home when the circumstances require it In a large-scale global sample, we demonstrate how individual personality and policy stringency jointly and independently determine whether or not someone will shelter-in-place Our findings suggest that as governments provisionally relax sheltering-in-place restrictions, some individuals will continue to engage in social distancing behaviors more than others (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
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