Deadly Divisions in Mass Pandemic Responses

• In Event: Psychology of COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is a widespread public health threat that requires superordinate national goals and collective action. However, social and political divides threaten to undermine the nation’s collective response, even to the point that in-group favoritism could increase the number of preventable mass deaths of American citizens. One of the key insights of social identity theory is that group members are motivated to privilege their group’s status, often at the expense of the greater good. Even more striking, group members are willing to sacrifice the well-being of their own group as long as their group’s relative status remains higher than that of the outgroup. In the context of COVID-19 and highly salient intergroup conflict, social identity theory would predict that citizens will take actions to protect their own group’s relative status rather than valuing the lives of all Americans, including their own.

We conducted a conjoint experiment in Fall 2020 – funded by the Time-sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS) and fielded by NORC’s nationally representative AmeriSpeak survey – to test how the social and political attributes of communities affect their perceived deservingness for life-saving aid from fellow Americans. The social group factors experimentally manipulated include partisanship, urbanicity, age, race, and degree of compliance with social distancing norms, with these groups selected due to their association with the parties and COVID-19’s disparate impacts on certain groups of Americans. We also used experimental items to gauge willingness to reopen the economy at the expense of particular groups of Americans. Finally, we asked respondents to report how they feel about potential disproportional deaths of Democrats and Republicans. While partisan bias clearly emerges in the acceptance of disproportional deaths of out-partisans, attitudes regarding assistance to communities in need is more nuanced. We thus empirically disentangle how partisan and racial in-group biases influence support for COVID-19 assistance. In general, we find that Democrats’ support is more sensitive to the group characteristics of the impacted community than Republicans.

The present research assesses whether the mass public is capable of a collective response to a mortal threat, or if existing intergroup conflicts on the basis of race, geography, and partisanship will undermine nation-wide cooperative efforts. In doing so, our results address a debate regarding when and how common threats activate superordinate goals. While the shared threat of COVID-19 should bring Americans together, current partisan divides seem to negate this process. Instead of uniting Americans, COVID-19 reveals fractures in the e pluribus unum myth upon which democracy rests, with broader implications for fundamental social group conflicts over resources and power within the United States.

Authors

• Julie Wronski, University of Mississippi

• Nathan P. Kalmoe, Louisiana State University

• Lilliana Hall Mason, University of Maryland, College Park