Brandt Mark J, Vallabha Shree, Turner-Zwinkels Felicity M
Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA.
Tilburg University, The Netherlands.
Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2025 Feb;51(2):284-300. doi: 10.1177/01461672231190233. Epub 2023 Aug 8.
We investigated if the COVID-19 pandemic's onset caused changes in political attitudes. Influential theories predict that the pandemic's onset will cause people to adopt more conservative attitudes, more culturally conservative attitudes, or more extreme attitudes. We comprehensively tested the external validity of these predictions by estimating the causal effect of the pandemic's onset on 84 political attitudes and eight perceived threats using fine-grained repeated cross-sectional data (Study 1, = 232,684) and panel data (Study 2, = 552) collected in the United States. Although the pandemic's onset caused feelings of threat, the onset only caused limited attitude change (six conservative shifts, four extremity shifts, 12 liberal shifts, 62 no change). Prominent theories of threat and politics did not make accurate predictions for this major societal threat. Our results highlight the necessity of testing psychological theories' predictive powers in real-life circumstances.
我们研究了新冠疫情的爆发是否导致了政治态度的变化。有影响力的理论预测，疫情的爆发将使人们采取更保守的态度、更具文化保守性的态度或更极端的态度。我们通过使用在美国收集的细粒度重复横截面数据（研究1，n = 232,684）和面板数据（研究2，n = 552）估计疫情爆发对84种政治态度和8种感知威胁的因果效应，全面检验了这些预测的外部有效性。尽管疫情的爆发引发了威胁感，但疫情爆发仅导致了有限的态度变化（六个保守转变、四个极端转变、十二个自由转变、62个无变化）。关于威胁和政治的著名理论并未对这一重大社会威胁做出准确预测。我们的研究结果凸显了在现实生活情境中检验心理学理论预测能力的必要性。
