ArticlePersonality and individual differences2021
Why are conservatives less concerned about the coronavirus (COVID-19) than liberals? Comparing political, experiential, and partisan messaging explanations.
Article in Personality and individual differences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed.
- Refining the role of behavioural and social sciences in pandemic response post-COVID-19.Nature human behaviour · 2026Review
- Applying machine learning to identify unrecognized COVID-19 deaths recorded as other causes of death in the United States.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- 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.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2025Article
- Empathic Conservatives and Moralizing Liberals: Political Intergroup Empathy Varies by Political Ideology and Is Explained by Moral Judgment.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2025Article
- Factors associated with seeking and receiving home antiviral therapy during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.Discover public health · 2025Article
- Effects of COVID-19 related economic threat on political conservatism, xenophobia, and racial bias in the United States.PloS one · 2024Article
- Ideological differences in COVID-19 vaccine intention: the effects of trust in the healthcare system, in complementary and alternative medicine, and perceived threat from the disease.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The COVID-19 pandemic and measurement of preschoolers' executive functions.Psychological assessment · 2023Article
- The role of audience favorability in processing (un)familiar messages: a heuristic-systematic model perspective.Human communication research · 2023Article
- Reliability but not bias: Developing a scale to measure preferred channels for risk information during the COVID pandemic.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2023Article
- Deciding between moral priorities and COVID-19 avoiding behaviors: A moral foundations vignette study.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2023Article
- Evaluation of the English Version of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale and Its Relationship with Behavior Change and Political Beliefs.International journal of mental health and addiction · 2023Article
- Responses to COVID-19 Threats: an Evolutionary Psychological Analysis.Evolutionary psychological science · 2022Article
- Exploration of the impact of political ideology disparity on COVID-19 transmission in the United States.BMC public health · 2022Article
- Red media, blue media, and misperceptions: examining a moderated serial mediation model of partisan media use and COVID-19 misperceptions.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2022Article
- Reductions in perceived COVID-19 threat amid UK's mass public vaccination programme coincide with reductions in outgroup avoidance (but not prejudice).The British journal of social psychology · 2022Article
- COVID-19 health practices and attitudes in the United States: the role of trust in healthcare.Zeitschrift fur Gesundheitswissenschaften = Journal of public health · 2022Article
- The dark side of belief in Covid-19 scientists and scientific evidence.Personality and individual differences · 2022Article
- Vaccination and vacci-notions: Understanding the barriers and facilitators of COVID-19 vaccine uptake during the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic.Public health in practice (Oxford, England) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Given research revealing conservatives are more sensitive to disease threat, it is curious that U.S. conservatives were less concerned than liberals with the COVID-19 pandemic. Across four studies that spanned almost ten months throughout the pandemic, we evaluated three potential reasons why conservatives were less concerned: (1) Motivated Political reasons (conservatives held COVID-specific political beliefs that motivated them to reduce concern), (2) Experiential reasons (conservatives were less directly affected by the outbreak than liberals), and (3) Conservative Messaging reasons (differential exposure to/trust in partisan conservative messaging). All four studies consistently showed evidence that political (and not experiential or partisan messaging) reasons more strongly mediated conservatives' lack of concern for COVID-19. Additional analyses further suggested that while they did not serve as strong mediators, experiential factors provided a boundary condition for the conservatism➔perceived threat relationship. These data on over 3000 participants are consistent with a new model of the ideology-disease outbreak interface that can be applied to both the ongoing pandemic and future disease outbreaks.
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