The Impact of Personality Traits on Panic Buying Behavior

We are interested in panic buying behavior during a pandemic within an undergraduate population. Since there is minimal research on COVID-19, we hope that our research will contribute to further investigations on this pandemic and other related psychological concepts and issues within the field. This is important because previous research has studied the relationship between buying behavior and natural disasters; however, there is a small amount of literature on COVID-19 because this is a new and rising topic that is changing day by day. Preparedness and risk perception are in tandem. We want to increase people’s knowledge about how to prepare for disasters and increase their own risk perceptions for future disasters scenarios. Past literature led us to focus primarily on three distinct personality traits: extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. The importance of researching personality traits shows us that there is a guide to an individual’s impulse buying behaviors (Olsen, Tudoran, Honkanen, & Verplanken, 2016). One specific trait, extraversion, was shown to be positively associated with panic excess buying behaviors as well as neuroticism. Previous research also found that the Five Factor Model effectively determined the risk for panic buying which originated from certain personality traits (Otero-López & Villardefrancos, 2013). This previous literature led us to develop our own research of how personality traits impact panic buying behaviors. We predict that if all participants score high on the 3 traits we are interested in, it will be positively be associated with an increase in panic buying behavior