Political Ideology Predicts Perceptions of the Threat of COVID-19 (and Susceptibility to Fake News About It)

By Dustin P. Calvillo, Bryan J. Ross, Ryan J. B. Garcia, Thomas J. Smelter, Abraham M. Rutchick. Social Psychology and Personality Science, 2020

455 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The present research examined the relationship between political ideology and perceptions of the threat of COVID-19. Due to Republican leadership’s initial downplaying of COVID-19 and the resulting partisan media coverage, we predicted that conservatives would perceive it as less threatening. Two preregistered online studies supported this prediction. Conservatism was associated with perceiving less personal vulnerability to the virus and the virus’s severity as lower, and stronger endorsement of the beliefs that the media had exaggerated the virus’s impact and that the spread of the virus was a conspiracy. Conservatism also predicted less accurate discernment between real and fake COVID-19 headlines and fewer accurate responses to COVID-19 knowledge questions. Path analyses suggested that presidential approval, knowledge about COVID-19, and news discernment mediated the relationship between ideology and perceived vulnerability. These results suggest that the relationship between political ideology and threat perceptions may depend on issue framing by political leadership and media.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f86b38930b3e5ff2333de2cfdfbad95b4f6cd64f

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Citations in the corpus

Political Psychology in the Digital (mis)Information age: A Model of News Belief and Sharing (2020, background): “…where conservative national leadership and news media has at times promoted false information, increased susceptibility to false news among conservatives was mediated by participants’ approval of the current Republican president and correlated with Fox News media consumption (Calvillo et al. 2020).”
Believing and sharing misinformation, fact-checks, and accurate information on social media: The role of anxiety during COVID-19 (2021, background): “Although conservatives are generally more susceptible to threats, “including the threat of germs and contamination” (Haidt, 2012: 279), they, in fact, perceive less threat from COVID-19 (Calvillo et al., 2020).”