Exposure and Aversion to Human Transmissible Diseases Predict Conservative Ideological and Partisan Preferences

Taking Stock and Looking Forward to the Future of Pathogen Politics in Light of New Insights and Recommendations: COVID-19 Threat Was Meaningfully Associated With Support for Liberal Policies in the United States

Infectious disease outbreaks are expected to predict support for conservative policies. However, earlier studies (January-June, 2020) reached conflicting findings regarding the association between COVID-19 threat and policy preferences in the United States. We revisit this issue by analyzing five nationally representative surveys conducted during the relatively severe periods of the pandemic (August 2020-December, 2020; total N = 82,753). Using Bayesian inference, we find strong evidence that subjective (e.g., fear of infection and pandemic outrage) but not objective (e.g., local cases and deaths) threat predicted support for liberal policies (e.g., immigration and universal health care). Meta-analyses revealed that the estimates depend on the type of subjective (.05 ≥ r ≤ .60) or objective (.00 ≥ r ≤ .14) COVID-19 threat. We propose an emotion-mediated dual-process model of pathogen management suggesting that infectious disease outbreaks activate both avoidance and caregiving motives that translate, respectively, into support for right-wing and left-wing policies.

Advocating for Mask-Wearing Across the Aisle: Applying Moral Reframing in Health Communication

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States public polarized along political lines in their willingness to adopt various health-protective measures. To bridge these political divides, we tested moral reframing as a tool for advocating for wearing face masks when audiences vary in their moral priorities. We additionally address a gap in prior moral reframing research by comparing responses to a topic-relevant non-moral appeal. Across two studies, we examined effects on perceived message effectiveness, intentions to wear masks, support for a nationwide mask mandate, and willingness to share messages on social media. We find support for the efficacy of ideology-matched moral arguments and generally find support for the boomerang effect of ideology-mismatched moral arguments. However, these effects were restricted to relatively liberal audiences; politically conservative message recipients did not differentiate between message conditions. We discuss these asymmetric effects and their implications for theory in moral rhetoric.

"The CDC Won't Let Me Be": The Opinion Dynamics of Support for CDC Regulatory Authority

CONTEXT

The CDC's ability to respond to communicable disease threats has recently met significant political and legal opposition. The authors unpack the influence of political ideology on support for CDC authority, and they experimentally assess whether highlighting ideology's role in responding to health threats might bolster CDC support.

METHODS

The authors fielded a demographically representative online survey experiment to 5,483 US adults. They assessed the sociopolitical correlates of CDC attitudes via multivariate regression analyses limited to a study-wide treatment group. Additionally, they tested the effectiveness of their experimental treatments via multivariate models that interact indicators of stimulus exposure with political ideology.

FINDINGS

Although most Americans support the CDC's role in responding to health crises, self-identified conservatives are significantly less likely to do so. This effect holds when accounting for respondents' limited government and anti-expert attitudes, which the authors replicated in nationally representative data. Encouragingly, though, emphasizing the CDC's role in combating the spread of COVID-19 is associated with significantly stronger levels of support on the ideological right.

CONCLUSIONS

Efforts to communicate the CDC's importance in responding to health threats can help bridge existing ideological divides and might create an incentive for policy makers to codify the agency's regulatory powers.

Perceived vulnerability to infectious disease and perceived harmfulness are as predictive of citizen response to COVID-19 as partisanship

Partisans have biased perceptions of objective conditions. At first glance, the COVID-19 pandemic would appear to be an example of this phenomenon. Noting that most citizens have consistently agreed about the pandemic, I argue that we have overlooked pre-political factors that are as influential as partisanship in shaping citizens' responses to the pandemic. I identify one such construct in perceived vulnerability to infectious disease (PVD). In one cross-sectional study and one panel study, I find that the influence of PVD on citizens' perceptions of COVID-19 equals that of partisanship. I also find that PVD can moderate the influence of partisanship on perceptions of harmfulness, nearly erasing the impact of being a Republican on perceiving COVID-19 as a threat. When led by PVD as well as partisanship to accurately perceive harm, citizens, including Republicans, attribute more responsibility to former president Donald Trump for his failed handling of the crisis.

Political Attitudes and Disease Threat: Regional Pathogen Stress Is Associated With Conservative Ideology Only for Older Individuals

What environmental factors are associated with individual differences in political ideology, and do such associations change over time? We examine whether reductions in pathogen prevalence in U.S. states over the past 60 years are associated with reduced associations between parasite stress and conservatism. We report a positive association between infection levels and conservative ideology in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. However, this correlation reduces from the 1980s onwards. These results suggest that the ecological influence of infectious diseases may be larger for older people who grew up (or whose parents grew up) during earlier time periods. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the political affiliation of 45,000 Facebook users, and find a positive association between self-reported political affiliation and regional pathogen stress for older (>40 years) but not younger individuals. It is concluded that the influence of environmental pathogen stress on ideology may have reduced over time.

Of Germs and Culture; Parasite Stress as the Origin of Individualism-Collectivism

Among four proposed origins of individualism-collectivism, modernization theory, rice versus wheat theory, climato-economic theory, and pathogen stress theory, the latter has gained more attention in cross-cultural and evolutionary psychology. Since the parasite stress theory of values and sociality makes a connection between infectious diseases and cultural orientations, it gained even more popularity during the COVID pandemic. But despite extensive research on parasite stress theory, it is not still clear what kind of infectious disease contributes more to the emergence of cultures, what are the possible mechanisms through which pathogenic threat gives rise to cultural systems, and how parasite stress might affect vertical vs. horizontal dimensions of individualism-collectivism. This review summarizes and integrates major findings of parasite stress theory related to individualism-collectivism and its closely related variables and discusses future directions that researchers can take to answer the remaining questions.

Heightened religiosity proactively and reactively responds to the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe: Novel insights from the parasite-stress theory of sociality and the behavioral immune system theory

According to the parasite-stress theory of sociality and the behavioral immune system theory, heightened religiosity serves an anti-pathogen function by promoting in-group assortative sociality. Thus, highly religious countries/territories could have better control of the COVID-19 (proactively avoids disease-threat), and heightened COVID-19 threat could increase religiosity (reactively responds to disease-threat). As expected, country-level religiosity (religion-related online searches (Allah, Buddhism, Jesus, etc.) and number of total religions/ethnoreligions) negatively and significantly predicted COVID-19 severity (a composite index of COVID-19 susceptibility, reproductive rate, morbidity, and mortality rates) (Study 1a), after accounting for covariates (e.g., socioeconomic factors, ecological factors, collectivism index, cultural tightness-looseness index, COVID-19 policy response, test-to-case ratio). Moreover, multilevel analysis accounting for daily- (e.g., time-trend effect, season) and macro-level (same as in Study 1a) covariates showed that country-level religious searches, compared with the number of total religions/ethnoreligions, were more robust in negatively and significantly predicting daily-level COVID-19 severity during early pandemic stages (Study 1b). At weekly level, perceived coronavirus threat measured with coronavirus-related searches (corona, covid, covid-19, etc.), compared with actual COVID-19 threat measured with epidemiological data, showed larger effects in positively predicting religious searches (Study 2), after accounting for weekly- (e.g., autocorrelation, time-trend effect, season, religious holidays, major-illness-related searches) and macro-level (e.g., Christian-majority country/territory and all country-level variables in Study 1) covariates. Accordingly, heightened religiosity could proactively and reactively respond to the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe.