Noncompliance with Masking as Coalition Signal to U.S. Conservatives in Pandemic

Boykin, K., Brown, M., Macchione, AL etal. Non-compliance with masking as a coalition signal to US conservatives in a pandemic. Evolutionary Psychology 7, 232-238 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-021-00277-x

Commentary

One of the heuristic cues that humans use to infer contamination threats is in-group and out-group status, which can lead to prejudice against out-group members due to potential novel pathogen exposure.

In the current study, we sought to investigate how the disease response in Americans was modulated by the COVID-19 pandemic if it was thought to originate in an out-group population, China. The association between COVID-19 and the Asian population predicted that participants with increased perceptions of vulnerability to the disease and higher levels of conservatism would report higher levels of aversion to unmasked targets among Asian targets.

Results indicate that conservative individuals are more accustomed to both Asian and Caucasian targets, especially male targets, when not wearing a mask.

These findings are contextualized by identifying ways in which mask wearing during a pandemic can better communicate coalition affiliation rather than health measures of more conservative individuals.