Moral Disengagement and Generalized Social Trust as Mediators and Moderators of Rule-Respecting Behaviors During the COVID-19 Outbreak

Guido Alessandri; Lorenzo Filosa; Marie S Tisak; Elisabetta Crocetti; Giuseppe Crea; Lorenzo Avanzi

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02102

Moral Disengagement and Generalized Social Trust as Mediators and Moderators of Rule-Respecting Behaviors During the COVID-19 Outbreak

Front Psychol. 2020 Aug 27:11:2102. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02102. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Guido Alessandri¹, Lorenzo Filosa¹, Marie S Tisak², Elisabetta Crocetti³, Giuseppe Crea⁴, Lorenzo Avanzi⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
² Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling, OH, United States.
³ Department of Psychology, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
⁴ Department of Psychology, Salesian Pontifical University, Rome, Italy.
⁵ Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy.

Abstract

In this study, we tested a theoretical model with moral disengagement, a mediator, and generalized social trust (GST), a mediator and a moderator of the relationship between personality traits and rule-respecting behaviors (i.e., social distancing and stay-at-home), during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in Italy. The data were collected on 1520 participants (61% males). General results are threefold: (1) moral disengagement mediated the relationship between emotional stability, narcissism, psychopathy, and social distancing; (2) among components of GST, trust in Government mediated the relationship between psychopathy and social distancing; trust in known others mediated the relationship between emotional stability, agreeableness, and Machiavellianism with total number of exits; trust in unknown others mediated the relationship of emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and psychopathy with average daily number of exits; (3) GST moderated the indirect effect of personality traits on rule-respecting behaviors through moral disengagement. The theoretical and practical importance of these results is discussed.

Keywords: COVID-19 outbreak; big five; dark triad; mediation; moderation; moral disengagement; rule-respecting behaviors; social distance.