Infection and Ideology: Perceived Vulnerability to Disease Predicts Political Conservatism

Jacob Appleby, Christopher M. Federico, Joseph A. Vitriol, Allison L. Williams. 2020. “Infection and Ideology- Perceived Vulnerability to Disease Predicts Political Conservatism.” PsyArXiv. January 4. doi:10.31234/osf.io/6ag92

Abstract: Recent research on the behavioral immune system suggests that perceived vulnerability to disease is associated with greater ingroup preference, conformity, and support for established cultural practices. However, little of this research has looked at the implications of perceived vulnerability to disease for an orientation linked to many of the above outcomes: ideology. In two studies, we test the hypothesis that perceived vulnerability to disease should be associated with greater political conservatism. In Study 1, we find a relationship between perceived vulnerability to disease and increases in conservatism over time. In Study 2, we use data from the World Values Survey to demonstrate that perceived vulnerability to disease predicts a stronger preference for the political right in a large sample of respondents from a wide variety of nations. Together, these results suggest that the consequences of the behavioral immune system may extend to abstract identifications like ideology.

General Discussion

In these studies, we extend prior work on the social implications of the behavioral immune system by examining the relation between subjective perceptions of disease vulnerability and ideological self-placement. Consistent with the expectation that the perceived prevalence of pathogens activates motivational goals and values congruent with conservatism, Study 1 found that perceived vulnerability to disease was associated with increases political conservatism over time and a stronger tendency to evaluate conservatives more positively than liberals net of baseline political beliefs. Extending this finding, Study 2 found that PVD was also related to a greater preference for the political right in a large representative survey of respondents from a wide variety of nations. In both cases, our results were robust to controls for relevant demographic characteristics and competing psychological determinants of ideology. Together, our findings address a major gap in our understanding of the behavioral immune system’s social implications. Although PVD has been shown to predict conformity (Murray & Schaller, 2012; Wu & Chang, 2012) and exclusionary outgroup attitudes (Faulkner et al., 2004), the current studies are the first to provide direct evidence for a relationship between PVD and ideological conservatism. Given the relatively abstract nature of ideology as an identification (Jost et al., 2009), they suggest that the operation of the behavioral immune system may also have consequences for outcomes less concrete and socially immediate than ingroup bias or conformity. Methodologically, they provide a more precise look at the relationship between the behavioral immune system and ideology than studies that rely solely on disgust sensitivity as an indicator of pathogen avoidance, which have yielded inconsistent findings (Tybur et al., 2009). By relying on a more direct indicator of pathogen avoidance that accounts for both the subjective perceptions of susceptibility to infection and related affective responses, our results help clarify the connection between the functioning of the behavioral immune system and ideology. Despite the strength of our evidence, our studies are not without their limitations. First, our correlational data cannot provide decisive evidence for a causal link between PVD and ideology. That said, our inclusion of a lagged indicator for our dependent variable does allows us to model change in conservatism across time as a function of PVD and overcome some of the bias potentially introduced by feedback effects (Finkel, 1995). Second, in Study 2, we were only able to use a simple proxy measure of PVD from the World Values Survey, rather than the validated scale employed in Study 1(Duncan et al., 2009). Nevertheless, the WVS items measure perceptions closely related to those included in the PVD scale, leaving us with confidence in their face validity; the similarity of our results across the two studies (and two very different samples) also testifies to the correspondence between the two measures. The evidence we present for a relationship between PVD and conservatism also has a number of broader implications, both for society as a whole and for future research. Like other threats (e.g., Jost et al., 2003, 2009), increased attention to public health concerns associated with infectious disease—both in communications from political elites and in media coverage—may have the potential to produce a conservative shift in public opinion and ideological sympathies. Such changes in the salience of disease threat may have both a main effect on conservatism, as well as a moderating effect in which they activate individual differences in PVD and produce especially large ideological shifts among those who feel chronically susceptible to infection. Given the tendency for pathogen prevalence to produce especially strong reactions against cultural outgroups and those who fail to conform to dominant social norms (e.g., Schaller et al. 2003; Thornhill & Fincher, 2012), we might also expect these effects to be especially strong when disease threats are associated with “foreign” groups (e.g., West Africans in the case of Ebola) or “non-normative” groups (e.g., gay men in the case of HIV). These questions await future research.