How do natural changes in disease avoidance motivation shape thoughts about and behaviors toward ingroup and outgroup members? During the COVID-19 pandemic, political party affiliation has been a strong predictor in the United States of COVID-19-related opinions, attitudes, and behaviors. Using a six-wave longitudinal panel survey of representative Americans (on Prolific, N = 1,124, from April 2020 to February 2021), we explored how naturally occurring changes across time in both risks of COVID-19 infection and people's disease avoidance motivation shaped thoughts about and behaviors toward Republicans and Democrats (e.g., perceived infection threat, feelings of disgust, desires to avoid). We found a significant effect of dispositional level of motivation, over and above powerful effects of in-party favoritism/out-party derogation: Participants with a dispositionally stronger motivation to avoid disease showed greater infection management responses, especially toward Republicans; this held even for Republican participants. More importantly, we also found a significant interactive effect of within-person variability and ecological infection risk: Participants who sensitively upregulated their motivation during the rapid spread of COVID-19 perceived greater infection threat by Republicans and felt less disgust toward and desire to avoid Democrats. This finding, too, held for Republican participants. These results provide evidence of functionally flexible within-person psychological disease avoidance-a theoretically important process long presumed and now demonstrated-and suggest another mechanism contributing to U.S. political polarization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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对政治党派的反应是由对 COVID-19 敏感的疾病回避心理决定的：对功能灵活性的纵向调查。


疾病回避动机的自然变化如何影响内群体和外群体成员的想法和行为？在 COVID-19 大流行期间，政党归属一直是美国与 COVID-19 相关的观点、态度和行为的有力预测因素。通过对具有代表性的美国人进行的六波纵向小组调查（Prolific，N = 1,124，从 2020 年 4 月到 2021 年 2 月），我们探讨了随着时间的推移，COVID-19 感染风险和人们的疾病回避动机自然发生的变化如何影响人们的想法关于共和党和民主党的信息和行为（例如，感知到的感染威胁、厌恶感、回避的愿望）。我们发现，除了党内偏袒/党外贬损的强大影响之外，动机的性格水平也有显着影响：具有更强的避免疾病动机的参与者表现出更大的感染管理反应，尤其是对共和党人；即使对于共和党参与者来说也是如此。更重要的是，我们还发现人体内变异性和生态感染风险之间存在显着的交互作用：在 COVID-19 快速传播期间敏感地提高动机的参与者感知到共和党人的感染威胁更大，并且对民主党人的厌恶感和回避欲望减少。这一发现也适用于共和党参与者。这些结果提供了功能灵活的人内心理疾病避免的证据——这是一个长期以来被假定并现在被证明的理论上重要的过程——并提出了导致美国政治两极分化的另一种机制。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。