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.

鉴于研究表明保守派对疾病威胁更敏感，奇怪的是美国保守派对 COVID-19 大流行的关注不如自由派。在整个大流行期间将近十个月的四项研究中，我们评估了保守派不太关心的三个潜在原因：(1) 有动机的政治原因（保守派持有特定于 COVID 的政治信仰，促使他们减少关注），(2) 经验原因（与自由派相比，保守派受疫情的直接影响较小），以及 (3) 保守派信息传播原因（对党派保守派信息的不同接触/信任）。所有四项研究一致表明，有证据表明政治（而不是经验或党派信息）更强烈地导致保守派对 COVID-19 缺乏关注。额外的分析进一步表明，虽然它们不是强有力的中介，但经验因素为保守主义 ➔ 感知到的威胁关系提供了边界条件。这些关于 3000 多名参与者的数据与一种新的意识形态-疾病爆发界面模型一致，该模型可应用于正在进行的大流行和未来的疾病爆发。