The Impact Of Perceived Stress On Interpersonal Trust And Institutional Trust During The COVID-19 Pandemic: The Moderating Role Of The Big Five Personalit

Many scholars have found that individuals’ perceived stress and negative emotions are significantly higher than before during the COVID-19 pandamic.According to the affect as information model,individuals under high perceived stress and negative emotions could have a negative impact on trust.According to the conservation of resources theory(COR),individuals’ resources could affect the stress responses.Individuals with rich resources can better cope with perceived stress and experience less negative emotions,thus having less negative impact on trust.The Five Factor Model(FFM)as a kind of psychological resources may buffer the negative effect of perceived stress on interpersonal trust and institutional trust and bring new discoveries for the research on interpersonal trust and institutional trust under the background of the COVID-19 pandemic.The big five personalities(neuroticism,extraversion,openness,agreeableness and conscientiousness)were used as moderating variables to explore the mechanism of perceived stress,interpersonal trust and institutional trust.This study used an open dataset(COVIDISTRESS Global Survey Dataset)collected worldwide during the COVID-19pandemic(30 March to 30 May 2020).After data processing such as pick out the outliers and dummy variables,94,332 valid data were obtained finally.The regression analysis results showed that: firstly,perceived stress can significantly negatively predict the level of interpersonal trust and institutional trust.Secondly,different personality traits have different moderating effects on relationship between perceived stress,interpersonal trust and institutional trust.The specific differences are as follows: openness personality traits can buffer the negative influence of perceived stress on interpersonal trust.Neuroticism,extraversion,agreeableness and conscientiousness personality traits have no significant moderating effect between perceived stress and interpersonal trust.Neuroticism,openness and agreeableness can buffer the negative effects of perceived stress on institutional trust,while extraversion can exacerbate the negative effects of perceived stress on institutional trust.Conscientiousness has no significant moderating effect between perceived stress and institutional trust.This study theoretically enriches the research on the antecedent variables of interpersonal trust and institutional trust under the epidemic situation.From the perspective of the big five personalities as psychological resources,its moderating effect between perceived stress,interpersonal trust and institutional trust are discussed.In practice,it also provides a point of reference for the research on stress and trust under the epidemic,and suggests that when facing the COVID-19 and future pandemics,we should pay much attention on how to solve the problem of people’s increased perceived stress.Besides,there are big differences in cognition,thinking and stress responses among individuals with different personality traits under the same perceived stress level.Therefore,Methods aimed at different personality traits should be adopted to stimulate their confidence in dealing with stress and enhance their ability to deal with stress,so as to improve people’s trust towards others and institutions.