- the variables they included in their analysis account for just 12 percent of the variability observed in the hoarding of toilet paper. "This suggests that how much people feel personally threatened by COVID-19 also depends on psychological factors not accounted for in our study
The real title should be: "none of the Big 5 personality trait explain toilet paper hoarding", which might be more interesting
Except they used HEXACO which isn't really viable for "emotionality" which is what they tested. Worse, they used the 24-question survey, not the 60 question or 100 question. If you dig into the HEXACO BHI, "emotionality" is judged based on whether you rate the following questions "1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral (neither agree, nor disagree), 4 = agree, and 5 = strongly agree": So you've got 100 people on Facebook being asked 24 questions, of which 4 are about the thing you think you're going to predict. Your results indicate much higher correlation between fear and age (p=0.019), fear and time spent in quarantine (p=.001), fear and gender (p=.001) and fear and being American (p=.001) than fear and buying toilet paper (.025). Not only that, the correlation between buying toilet paper and "conscientiousness" (.045) isn't much worse than that with TP and fear. Finally, 620 of your sample are German while 150 are American... and the Germans didn't hoard a lot of toilet paper. So really, this is one of the more nothing studies done in a while, which is probably why CNN decided that it was actually about conscientiousness.I am afraid of feeling pain
I worry less than others
I can easily overcome difficulties on my own
I have to cry during sad or romantic movies