Can a pandemic make people more socially conservative? Political ideology, gender roles, and the case of COVID‐19

Abstract

The first months of 2020 rapidly threw people into a period of societal turmoil and pathogen threat with the COVID‐19 pandemic. By promoting epistemic and existential motivational processes and activating people's behavioral immune systems, this pandemic may have changed social and political attitudes. The current research specifically asked the following question: As COVID‐19 became pronounced in the United States during the pandemic's emergence, did people living there become more socially conservative? We present a repeated‐measures study ( N = 695) that assessed political ideology, gender role conformity, and gender stereotypes among U.S. adults before (January 25–26, 2020) versus during (March 19–April 2, 2020) the pandemic. During the pandemic, participants reported conforming more strongly to traditional gender roles and believing more strongly in traditional gender stereotypes than they did before the pandemic. Political ideology remained constant over time. These findings suggest that a pandemic may promote the preference for traditional gender roles.

Psychological Science in the Wake of COVID-19: Social, Methodological, and Metascientific Considerations

“…A small shift toward more traditional gender-role conformity may have occurred since the pandemic’s start (Rosenfeld & Tomiyama, 2021), which can have implications not only for men and women but also for the experiences of nonbinary and transgender individuals and others’ attitudes toward them. Although the pandemic could widen gender-role differentiation, it could also enhance egalitarianism.…”

Dual pandemics of COVID‐19 and systemic racism: The roles of perceptions of inequities, civic values, and conservatism in mask‐wearing behavior

“…If civic values similarly changed between September 2019 and July 2020 and we had measured civic values in July 2020, then civic values may also have emerged as a moderator in our models. However, extreme changes in our data seem unlikely, as existing research suggests that political ideology was stable during the beginning of the COVID‐19 pandemic (Rosenfeld & Tomiyama, 2021). Nevertheless, both moderation and mediation mechanisms may be present; that is, conservatism may predict perceptions of inequities (or civic values), which in turn predict mask‐wearing.…”

The Advent of the COVID-19 Epidemic Did Not Affect Americans’ Endorsement of Moral Foundations

“…The increase in right-wing authoritarianism was only very weakly related to the perceived threat from the pandemic (explaining only 5% of the variance) and not related to actual exposure. A study in the United States ( Rosenfeld and Tomiyama, 2021 ) found a very small increase ( d av around 0.1) in endorsement of gender stereotypes (conformity) and no change in political conservatism (ambiguous). The increase in gender stereotypes was not related to perceived threat from the pandemic.…”

“…Note that although no prior experimental or longitudinal work has examined the effect of disease threat on moral foundations, there are several such studies of how various related constructs (e.g., social conservatism, political conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism, social-dominance orientation, gender stereotypes, and sexual prejudice) were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic ( Fischer et al, 2020 ; Golec de Zavala et al, 2020 ; Karwowski et al, 2020 ; Rosenfeld and Tomiyama, 2021 ) and the 2014 Ebola outbreak in the United States ( Beall et al, 2016 ; Inbar et al, 2016 ; Schaller et al, 2017 ; Tiokhin and Hruschka, 2017 ). These studies have yielded a mix of small effects and null effects.…”