An article published in January 2025 and co-authored by University of Michigan psychology research technician Zoe Dunnum and Michigan State University psychology professor Jennifer Watling Neal examines how individuals’ personality traits relate to their political identities and the news media they consumed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study, using the Big Five Traits and conducted by surveying 786 Michigan adults from varying household income and education levels during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, found no significant association between openness, the level of intellectual variety a person needs, and liberal COVID-19 news consumption, defined as news sources labeled “left” or “lean left” from media bias review company AllSides as liberal. While the authors were not able to replicate the findings of previous research by Minchul Kim and Cheonsee Kim, they did find agreeableness, a trait characterized by empathy and cooperation, correlated with liberal COVID-19-related news consumption, and that conscientiousness, a trait characterized by responsibility and self-discipline, had a significant negative association with liberal COVID-19-related news consumption. Finally, extraversion, the tendency to obtain gratification from outside of an individual, had a positive association with the consumption of COVID-19 news from conservative media sources.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Neal said the study attempted to confirm and build on findings from the previous 2018 study that found an association between “openness to experience” and “consumption of attitude-challenging news media.”
“This particular research project was a replication study,” Neal said. “We wanted to see if some findings that were pre-(COVID-19) pandemic kind of translated into findings that we had during COVID-19. Some of this past research was conducted by two researchers…(and) they found this connection between openness and liberal news consumption, regardless of how you identify in terms of your political party.”
One limitation of the research was that it was conducted using Michigan residents. As the results focus on just one state, Neal said the results may not accurately reflect the broader American population.
“We of course didn’t have national data here — that is the data is really focused on the state of Michigan,” Neal said. “So we don’t necessarily know if that data would translate to the broader population of folks in the U.S. at the time.”
Neal also said agreeableness was linked in the study to the consumption of liberal news sources during the COVID-19 pandemic. She believes the reason behind this is agreeable individuals’ tendency to display prosocial behaviors, behaviors associated with benefiting others and society, being compatible with liberal individuals’ encouragement to follow public health guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Agreeableness in our study was linked to more liberal news use during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Neal said. “So that’s an interesting finding, that more agreeable people tended to be more likely to use more liberal news sources and then extroversion on the other hand, so people who are very outgoing, during the COVID-19 pandemic are associated with more conservative news use.”
While the study did not find a significant relationship between openness and the consumption of liberal COVID-19 news, it did find that openness was negatively associated with the consumption of conservative COVID-19 news coverage. In an interview with The Daily, LSA sophomore Aidan Rozema, co-chair of the University’s chapter of College Democrats, said he believed personality traits could correlate with the way people reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic, as he sees Democrats and those who consume liberal media as more cautious in regards to the pandemic.
“I think personality definitely plays into how people acted during the (COVID-19) pandemic,” Rozema said. “I know Democrats to be very, somewhat cautionary… I mean, Trump was holding all these rallies and mass spreading events and his followers did get sick because of that. Joe Biden was holding Zoom events and transitioning his campaign to be virtual.”
The study also found extraversion to be associated with conservative COVID-19-related news consumption. LSA sophomore Alexander Richmond, president of College Republicans at the University of Michigan said his extraversion leads to connections both in and outside of politics and how it leads to political identity.
“Personally, I am a very extroverted person,” Richmond said. “My time working in politics … I’ve had some great interactions with a lot of people that have allowed me to understand kind of, you know, what leads people to be more conservative, what leads people to be more liberal.”
While the 2025 research wasn’t able to replicate the 2018 study’s results, Neal said this does open the door for future research and hopes to see a similar study using data from across the US.
“I think we need to continue to replicate this work and maybe doing it in a broader national sample as well, rather than just Michigan, I also think we have some interesting findings related to some other personality variables where we were looking at them and more of an exploratory fashion.”
Daily Staff Reporter Kayla Lugo can be reached atklugo@umich.edu.
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