Openness relates to COVID-19 vaccination rates across 48 United States but politics Trump personality

Does geographic variation in personality across the United States relate to COVID-19 vaccination rates? To answer this question, we combined multiple state-level datasets: (a) Big Five personality averages (i.e., extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness; Rentfrow et al., 2008), (b) COVID-19 full-vaccination rates (CDC, 2021a), (c) health-relevant demographic covariates (population density, per capita gross domestic product, and racial/ethnic data; Webster et al., 2021), and (d) political and religiosity data. Analyses showed openness as the strongest correlate of full-vaccination rates (r = 0.51). Controlling for other traits, demographic covariates, and spatial dependence, openness remained significantly related to full-vaccination rates (r(p) = 0.55). Adding political and religiosity data to this model diminished openness effects for full-vaccination rates to non-significance (r(p) = 0.26); however, extraversion emerged as a significant correlate of full-vaccination rates (r(p) = 0.37). Although politics are paramount, we suspect that states with higher average openness scores are more conducive to novel thinking and behavior-dispositions that may be crucial in motivating people to take newly-developed vaccines based on new technologies to confront a novel coronavirus.