Informational Behavior in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Psychological Predictors

Abstract

The core problem of the COVID-19 pandemic for psychologists is to find out how people cope with the stress of isolation and the threat of fatal disease. The scale of the pandemical impact on the psychological well-being of an individual has still no knowledge and psychological predictors which the impact depends on need to be identified. This paper presents an empirical study of informational behavior and its psychological predictors in the pandemic. The research was held online in April-May 2020. The total amount of 165 participants, aged from 18 to 66. The subjects were chosen from a randomly selected sample. The participants were asked to estimate their informational consumption in pandemic. Tolerance to ambiguity, hardiness and anxiety was studied in groups distinguished according to changes in informational consumption. The findings of this study indicate a significant correlation between informational behavior and psychological characteristics related to coping with stress. Besides the analysis proved a negative correlation between reactive and personal anxiety and tolerance to ambiguity, hardiness and its components. We have confirmed that increased informational comsumption can be considered as a coping strategy for overcoming the pandemic social isolation among respondents with low hardiness and tolerance to ambiguity. Stable and decreased informational consumption indicates that respondents with high hardiness and tolerance to ambiguity and low state and trait anxiety don’t need to consume information for coping with difficulties of pandemic self-isolation. Future work will concentrate on expanding the list of psychological predictors of informational behavior and studying the features of their interaction in different situations.