The Best Personality style for a Pandemic?
What kinds of people best manage risks during hard times?
“Because I could not stop for Death -
He kindly stopped for me -”
-Emily Dickenson¹
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
-Robert Frost²
At 8 AM on Saturday morning I sit in a far-off corner of the parking lot and pause. My hand freezes on the door handle, as if I were gripping the wet, splintered, mud encrusted rung of a WWI trench latter, one foot on the bottom rung, tensing for a whistle blast I do not want to hear.
People in movies used to refer to the “bullet with my name on it.” But as I sit in the grocery store parking lot I am thinking of something else. I am thinking of the infinitely tiny, spiky beach ball particle of virus with my name on it, that may be waiting for me, stalking me, somewhere in the supermarket. It might be hiding right now in the throat of a smart young woman who does not feel sick, who the moment I enter the store will exhale it into an aerosol that will sail on a gentle draft of air, float for a moment, then land like a kiss on my lip. Or it might have been left by a schoolteacher an hour ago on the handle of the cart that I am about to grasp, from which I can not remove it because of course for the first time in my experience the store’s large canister of sanitary wipes is empty. It could be resting in the grease of the store employee’s fingerprint on the shiny plastic bag of romaine lettuce that I came to pick up.
We can tell ourselves that we are “staying safe” when we go out to places like the store. There may even be special “safe hours” when stores are reserved for the elderly and the medically compromised. We wash our hands raw, stay 6 feet away, and so on. But it’s important not to kid ourselves. Those steps can never be a guarantee. In fact, the guarantee is that in many cases, they won’t be. There are too many ways to make a mistake, and no human being can catch them all.
The most important thing to remember about reassuring and overly-simple lists of protective steps is that they are not perfect, and can never be perfect. Defense systems always have holes, or eventually the enemy evolves ways around them. To quote the novel Jurassic Park, “it turns out you can’t predict more than a few seconds into the future. Because almost immediately very small effects, imperfections…start to make a difference. And it doesn’t take long before they overpower your careful calculations.”³
As the virus spreads through our population the odds of catching it in even “safe” locations go up. Every day it is probably more dangerous to go shopping than it was the day before. This is not a permanent situation, but for now, it is the scary reality.
But the point of this article is not to trigger panic or paralysis in the face of an empty produce bin. It is rather to explore and define, as best we can in this rapidly evolving situation, some of the psychological factors that may help keep us safe in this kind of emergency. What does it take to improve your odds of surviving and staying healthy in such situations? Are there particular attitudes, skills, abilities that are likely to help us out?
This is actually a big, complicated question, but psychological research does provide some hints. Some of the most interesting come from studies of longevity — studies of who lives longest. There are mountains of research on specific things such as diet, exercise, and so on. But I want to suggest one especially intriguing piece of research, that provides I think a broader overview of the psychological qualities and behavior that seem related to the best odds of surviving this or any other situation in life.
In 1921 a psychologist named Lewis Terman began to recruit gifted children in order to learn about the development of leadership and high potential. The plan was to collect as much information as possible about these girls and boys, and then to follow them and re-measure them repeatedly. This grew into a massive project that tracked these people’s medical, psychological, family, career and other things for over 90 years. The study would eventually involve generations of researchers, and follow the participants until their deaths.
The Terman study is one of the great studies in the history of psychological research. Never before, (and likely never again) would so much information be gathered about any such group of people. The study has been the basis of hundreds of publications on everything from the relationship of IQ to life success, to the effects of personality, life experiences, , marriage, relationships, lifestyle factors and so on, on the direction and outcome of a persons life.
In 2011, two psychologists, Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin, published the results of an extensive study of the Terman data focusing on the factors related to long-term survival in this group of participants. This study is summarized in a fascinating book called The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study.⁴
By at time of this 2011 study, most of the original study subjects had died. In analyzing mountains of research about these people, the authors found some consistent and surprising patterns that differentiated people who lived the longest, patterns that were less likely to occur in people whose lives were cut short years or even decades earlier. As the authors point out:
“…surprisingly, the long-lived among them did not find the secret to health in broccoli, medical tests, vitamins or jogging. Rather, they were individuals with certain constellations of habits and patterns of living. Their personalities, career trajectories, and social lives proved highly relevant to their long-term health.” (Friedman & Martin, pp. ix — x.)
To be sure, luck played some part in who stayed well and who did not. But the single most powerful predictor of longevity prove to be a particular (and particularly relevant to us now) personality trait, which in modern personality research terms is called conscientiousness.
Conscientiousness as a survival factor
“…The findings clearly revealed that the best childhood personality predictor of longevity was conscientiousness — the qualities of a prudent, persistent, well organized person… somewhat obsessive and not at all carefree…” (Friedman & Martin, p.9.)
Few of the many specific factors in terms of diet, exercise, sociability and so on that we are told will help us live a long time proved to be very important in living a long time. The main thing that predicted longevity was this quality of conscientiousness: “the prudent, dependable children lived the longest. The strength of this finding was unexpected, but it proved to be a very important and enduring one.” (p. 9).
“…By the end of the 20th century, 70% of the Terman men and 51 percent of the Terman women had died. It was the unconscientious among them who had been dying in especially large numbers.” (Friedman & Martin, p. 15.)
So why would having a conscientious personality style beat out jogging, broccoli eating, socializing, and other such qualities?
The authors propose three general reasons:
First, conscientiousness may be paired with the greater tendency to resist diseases, for instance if people have differences in levels of various neurotransmitters such as serotonin (low serotonin tends to result in more impulsivity, depression, and so on) Some of these factors can be modified and there is certainly likely to be a question of whether your serotonin levels are lower and that triggers less conscientious behavior, or if your personality and behavior patterns affect the brain chemistry. (We now know more about how our mental and physical actions dramatically impact our brain functioning, neurotransmitters, and so on.)
Second, it isn’t just the broccoli or jogging in themselves, but the very wide range of healthy living patterns that tend to be part of the conscientious “package.” If the Good Fairy from a children’s movie had hovered over your crib and by tapping her wand on your tiny head, blessed you with the gift of conscientiousness, it would likely mean that through your life you would just naturally tend to do healthier things such as:
- Avoiding unnecessary risks, such as by wearing seatbelts, not speeding
- Avoiding unhealthy “vices” like smoking, drug use, heavy alcohol us
- Avoiding hanging out with the “wrong crowd” of future felons and addicts
- Developing clusters of health-enhancing patterns of everything from hygiene to reading health advice and so choosing better diets, exercising and so on
- Reducing the amount of time you spend creating and so having to cope with self-inflicted emergencies, such as by doing your homework ahead of time, saving up a car repair fund, flossing, etc.
More broadly, conscientiousness tends to lead to structuring the major parts of your life in ways that tend to immunize you from a host of dangers. For instance, there is a saying that you will inevitably come to resemble the five people you spend the most time with. You tend to adopt lifestyles, consider career paths, develop personal habits and ways of interacting with others, that create a complexly layered “nest” that is different than that of people who are more “fancy free.” And most of the patterns and “curated” life settings and situations in the personal universes of conscientious persons tend to guarantee strong survival odds.
In short, conscientious persons tend to create healthier pathways through the woods of life. This includes a tendency to do a lot of things, from picking healthy life partners to choosing healthy work situations to spending time thinking about and maintaining good friendships, to seeking out articles giving them advice (like this one), and on and on.
In a way, this has been intuited by people for centuries. Much of the “good advice” and wisdom traditions, and even the spiritual teachings of most religions, include a great many pieces of advice on the way to live a better life. Whether it is the teachings of Confucius or the Buddha, the guidance in the Bible or Koran, the tribal wisdom taught by village elders or grandmas, or even the survival and effectiveness training and support in the military, much of the activity of humanity is about teaching us how to create a “long life pathway.” It is likely true that the more one attends to most of these wisdom traditions (taken as a whole — there are exceptions in every belief system), the more happy, healthy, and long-lived a person is likely to be.
Choosing your pathway through the pandemic
While there are no absolute guarantees in terms of getting sick (and if so, dying or surviving the illness) during this pandemic, it seems likely that the lessons from the 90+ years long Terman Study can give us some pretty reasonable guidance for surviving.
Instead of focusing on just a few specific steps you can take, such as frequent hand washing and not touching your face, it may be more useful to adapt a broader approach. Whether or not you see yourself as a particularly “conscientious” versus “carefree, happy-go-lucky” individual, today might be a good day to at least try to “Think like a conscientious person.” You probably already have a good idea of what this would be: Think about the two or three most conscientious, careful people that you know. If you are inclined to be a more “fancy free” person, they may even seem a little boring to you, but nevertheless, jot down a list of some of the things that they do differently than you, and consider whether some of their patterns of behavior would be useful to you in a high-risk situation.
As a starting point, think through the survival strategies in place for you and your family. I’m not necessarily talking about stashing food and ammo in the woods. We’re just talking about making some simple general decisions, such as:
Where are you going to go and where are you going to avoid going? Crowded stores? Family reunions? Restaurants?
Here, listening to the news may be helpful. Are you going to stay in touch with what’s going on in the news? Conscientious people usually seek out information, and are alert to their surroundings and to what is safe and not safe. They look before they leap.
Do you know what’s going on in your area? Are there travel restrictions in place? Do you happen to live in a state where your officials are still (it won’t last) urging you to go out and mingle and keep business going, and if so, does it make any sense to follow this advice when health authorities and scientists are saying the opposite?
(This brings up another question: where are you getting your information? We are in an odd situation in which there are politicians promoting certain behaviors that often are dramatically at odds with what medical professionals and scientists are advising. You have to decide to whom you are going to listen: someone running for re-election, or your family doctor and experts in pandemics?)
Do you think that just washing your hands and staying 6 feet away from people is enough? What else can you do?
Do you think you can handle not going out to social events for a while? What’s your risk tolerance? The point is that thinking this through is conscientious behavior, whatever you decide. But generally speaking, more conscientious people will tend to err on the side of caution, and generally speaking, they will outlive people who do not.
Making lists geared to specific situations can help: if you have to go to work, what are five things that you can resolve to do to stay as safe as possible? If you. Need to go to thedoctor to see if you are ill, do you know if they want people to call ahead so as to ensure they don’t contaminate other patients? If you are going to need those bags of groceries, can you pick a safest time to go? Can you plot out carefully which parts of the store you are going to go to, instead of wandering around aimlessly and so possibly doubling the amount of time you risk exposure to infected persons?
What other things can you think of? Keep a running list. In this situation, more “OCD”, within reason, is likely to be better than less.
Here, then, is your choice in the matter. It’s where you can exert maximum control. If, like Emily Dickinson, you think about how death may “kindly stop for me,” do you plan to be home when he arrives?
In the course of your life there are many opportunities to choose the less safe path. But if you are able to adopt a conscientious, thoughtful set of plans that increase the odds of getting through this safely, you will probably indeed have many miles to go before you sleep.
Greg Korgeski, Ph.D. is a Vermont licensed psychologist (“Psychologist -doctorate) and a free range writer. He is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Enhancing Your Social IQ,, and of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Phobias. The above article is not a substitute for professional advice or medical, psychological or other care that you may need. Use any suggestions here at your own risk and after consulting with your own care providers, if need be.
Citations:
- The Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson (Edited by Thomas H Johnson) Little, Brown and Company
- The Poetry of Robert Frost (Edited by Edward Connery Lathem) Henry Holt
- Madhav, Oppenheim, Gallivan, Prime Mulembakani, Rubin & Wolfe, 2017: Pandemic: Risks, Impacts, and Mitigation, in Jamison, Gelband, Horton et al., editors, Disease Control Priorities: Improving Health and Reducing Poverty, 3rd edition, 2017.
- Crichton, Michael. Jurassic Park: A Novel (p. 83). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
- Howard Friedman, Ph.D. & Leslie R. Martin, Ph.D. (2011). The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study. Hudson Street Press.
(Photo credit: author and B.B. Smith.)
