The advent of the COVID-19 epidemic did not affect Americans’ endorsement of moral foundations

Abstract

Prior work has suggested that existential threats in the form of terror attacks may shift liberals’ reliance on moral foundations to more resemble those of conservatives. We therefore hypothesized that endorsement of these moral foundations would have increased when the COVID-19 epidemic became a salient threat. To examine this hypothesis we conducted a longitudinal study with 237 American participants across the liberal-conservative spectrum, in which their endorsement of various moral foundations were measured before and after the advent of the pandemic. We did not find evidence of any systematic change in the endorsement of any moral foundation, neither in general nor specifically among liberals or specifically among those who perceived the greatest threat from COVID-19. We conclude that the threat from the pandemic does not seem to have had any substantial effect on the moral foundations that people rely on. This finding is consistent with other longitudinal studies of the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on measures related to conservatism.

The Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic Made People Feel Threatened, but Had a Limited Impact on Political Attitudes in the United States

“…With this design we can also estimate if the causal effect of the pandemic varies across people (Bolger et al, 2019;Bryan et al, 2021). The limited average effects found previously (e.g., Stern & Axt, 2022;Vartanova et al, 2021) may have been the result of underlying heterogeneity, with people responding to the pandemic in different ways. Our design gives us the opportunity to estimate individual effects for each participant.…”

“…Some studies also report findings that are contrary to the threat perspectives we outlined above, including finding that COVID-19 caused support for mainstream parties and away from the extremes (Bisbee & Honig, 2022) or no clear effect in a liberal or conservative direction (Dennison et al, in press;Stern & Axt, 2022;Vartanova et al, 2021;Yam et al, 2020). In short, there is mixed evidence for the three hypotheses.…”

“…months; Mize et al, 2021;Vartanova et al, 2021). If data is only collected after the pandemic's onset, then we are not able to estimate the causal effect of the pandemic because we cannot observe what data were like prior to the pandemic.…”