Political ideology predicts preventative behaviors and infections amid COVID-19 in democracies.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Tung HH
PROVIDER: S-EPMC9278997 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:From an early age, children are willing to pay a personal cost to punish others for violations that do not affect them directly. Various motivations underlie such "costly punishment": People may punish to enforce cooperative norms (amplifying punishment of in-groups) or to express anger at perpetrators (amplifying punishment of out-groups). Thus, group-related values and attitudes (e.g., how much one values fairness or feels out-group hostility) likely shape the development of group-related punishment. The present experiments (N = 269, ages 3-8 from across the United States) tested whether children's punishment varies according to their parents' political ideology-a possible proxy for the value systems transmitted to children intergenerationally. As hypothesized, parents' self-reported political ideology predicted variation in the punishment behavior of their children. Specifically, parental conservatism was associated with children's punishment of out-group members, and parental liberalism was associated with children's punishment of in-group members. These findings demonstrate how differences in group-related ideologies shape punishment across generations.
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Project description:Popular press articles have asserted that those with certain political orientations are less likely to wear face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose that this relation is due to differential information shared by political parties rather than values associated with face mask wearing. We further propose that, when assessed together, political party affiliation (e.g., Republican, Democrat) but not political ideology (e.g., conservative, liberal) predicts face mask wearing, and this effect is mediated by perceptions of efficacy doubts but not perceptions that face masks infringe upon the wearer's independence. We performed a three-wave, time-separated survey study with 226 participants. Each proposal was supported. When assessed together, political party affiliation but not political ideology significantly predicted face mask wearing, and a significant indirect effect was observed via perceptions of efficacy doubts but not independence. Our results support that face mask wearing is a unique preventative action, which should be understood using political theory.
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Project description:Vaccine uptake is critical for mitigating the impact of COVID-19 in the United States, but structural inequities pose a serious threat to progress. Racial disparities in vaccination persist despite the increased availability of vaccines. We ask what factors are associated with such disparities. We combine data from state, federal, and other sources to estimate the relationship between social determinants of health and racial disparities in COVID-19 vaccinations at the county level. Analyzing vaccination data from 19 April 2021, when nearly half of the US adult population was at least partially vaccinated, we find associations between racial disparities in COVID-19 vaccination and median income (negative), disparity in high school education (positive), and vote share for the Republican party in the 2020 presidential election (negative), while vaccine hesitancy is not related to disparities. We examine differences in associations for COVID-19 vaccine uptake as compared with influenza vaccine. Key differences include an amplified role for socioeconomic privilege factors and political ideology, reflective of the unique societal context in which the pandemic has unfolded.
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Project description:Ecological and cross-sectional studies have indicated that conservative political ideology is associated with better health. Longitudinal analyses of mortality are needed because subjective assessments of ideology may confound subjective assessments of health, particularly in cross-sectional analyses.Data were derived from the 2008 General Social Survey-National Death Index data set. Cox proportional analysis models were used to determine whether political party affiliation or political ideology was associated with time to death. Also, we attempted to identify whether self-reported happiness and self-rated health acted as mediators between political beliefs and time to death.In this analysis of 32,830 participants and a total follow-up time of 498,845 person-years, we find that political party affiliation and political ideology are associated with mortality. However, with the exception of independents (adjusted HR (AHR)=0.93, 95% CI 0.90 to 0.97), political party differences are explained by the participants' underlying sociodemographic characteristics. With respect to ideology, conservatives (AHR=1.06, 95% CI 1.01 to 1.12) and moderates (AHR=1.06, 95% CI 1.01 to 1.11) are at greater risk for mortality during follow-up than liberals.Political party affiliation and political ideology appear to be different predictors of mortality.
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Project description:In March 2020, Ohio, along with many other states, enacted a stay-at-home order (i.e., "shutdown") to limit the spread of COVID-19. As a result of lower traffic, crashes should also have declined. We investigated whether crash rates declined in Ohio during the stay-at-home order and explore possible predictors for the decrease, such as reduced travel in compliance with the order, along with speeding, alcohol, and drug use. In addition, we examined whether support for President Trump would relate to greater travel and greater crashes (particularly during the stay-at-home order, when greater travel indicated lower compliance). The overall rate of crashes fell as people stayed home, mainly due to a decline in minor crashes. In contrast, the rate of serious crashes did not fall. Instead, percentage of alcohol-related crashes increased during the stay-at-home order, and the reduction in travel was associated with greater speeding-related crashes. Because alcohol and speeding tend to increase crash severity, these two factors may explain why severe crash rates were not reduced by lower traffic. Instead, it appears that those drivers remaining on the roads during the shutdown may have been more prone to risky behaviors, evidenced by a greater percentage of alcohol-related crashes across the state during the shutdown and greater speed-related crashes in counties with less traffic. In addition, county-level support for President Trump indirectly predicted greater rates of crashes (of all types) via increased travel (i.e., lower compliance with the shutdown), even while controlling for county-level income, rurality, and Appalachian region. Importantly, this mediated effect was stronger during the weeks of the shutdown, when greater travel indicated lower compliance. Thus, lower compliance with the stay-at-home order and increased risky driving behaviors by remaining drivers may explain why lower traffic did not lead to lower serious crashes.
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Project description:BackgroundBased on individual-level studies, previous literature suggested that conservatives and liberals in the United States had different perceptions and behaviors when facing the COVID-19 threat. From a state-level perspective, this study further explored the impact of personal political ideology disparity on COVID-19 transmission before and after the emergence of Omicron.MethodsA new index was established, which depended on the daily cumulative number of confirmed cases in each state and the corresponding population size. Then, by using the 2020 United States presidential election results, the values of the built index were further divided into two groups concerning the political party affiliation of the winner in each state. In addition, each group was further separated into two parts, corresponding to the time before and after Omicron predominated. Three methods, i.e., functional principal component analysis, functional analysis of variance, and function-on-scalar linear regression, were implemented to statistically analyze and quantify the impact.ResultsFindings reveal that the disparity of personal political ideology has caused a significant discrepancy in the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. Specifically, the findings show that at the very early stage before the emergence of Omicron, Democratic-leaning states suffered from a much greater severity of the COVID-19 threat but, after July 2020, the severity of COVID-19 transmission in Republican-leaning states was much higher than that in Democratic-leaning states. Situations were reversed when the Omicron predominated. Most of the time, states with Democrat preferences were more vulnerable to the threat of COVID-19 than those with Republican preferences, even though the differences decreased over time.ConclusionsThe individual-level disparity of political ideology has impacted the nationwide COVID-19 transmission and such findings are meaningful for the government and policymakers when taking action against the COVID-19 crisis in the United States.
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Project description:ObjectiveThe impact of cognitive function and decline on political ideology is unknown. We studied the relationship between cognition and both political orientation and political policy choices in a population of older persons.DesignLongitudinal investigation.SettingA retirement community and its surroundings in Southern California.Participants151 members of a longitudinal investigation of aging and dementia in the oldest-old (the 90+ Study), mean age 95 years.MeasurementsParticipants self-reported their political ideology (7-point scale from extremely liberal to extremely conservative) and policy preferences for federal spending on public schooling, aid to the poor, and protecting the environment, as well as on preferences on immigration rates, death penalty, and university admission. The same political survey was mailed to participants twice: at time one and 6-months later. Cognitive function based on neurological examination and cognitive testing was classified as normal (55%), cognitive impairment/not dementia (CIND) (33%), or dementia (12%). We calculated rank correlations between ideology and policy choices, stratified by cognitive status, and agreement between Surveys 1 and 2.ResultsPolitical ideology/orientation was highly consistent over a six-month period (84% agreement) among the 122 who returned the second survey, with no significant relationship to cognitive status. Among cognitively impaired (CIND and dementia), however, there was significant loss of consistency between an individual's political orientation and their policy choices. Level of political engagement was high for participants, with more than 90% voting in the 2016 presidential election.ConclusionIn this population of older persons, political identification on the liberal-conservative spectrum was resilient despite cognitive decline, but its meaning and function were changed. For the cognitively impaired it remained a self-defining label, but no longer operated as a higher order framework for orienting specific policy preferences. There appeared to be loss of coherence between the political orientation and political policy choices of cognitively impaired individuals. Given the high level of political engagement of these individuals, these results have substantial public policy implications.
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Project description:Emerging research has begun investigating the neural underpinnings of the biological and psychological differences that drive political ideology, attitudes, and actions. Here, we explore the neurological roots of politics through conducting a large sample, whole-brain analysis of functional connectivity (FC) across common fMRI tasks. Using convolutional neural networks, we develop predictive models of ideology using FC from fMRI scans for nine standard task-based settings in a novel cohort of healthy adults (n = 174, age range: 18 to 40, mean = 21.43) from the Ohio State University Wellbeing Project. Our analyses suggest that liberals and conservatives have noticeable and discriminative differences in FC that can be identified with high accuracy using contemporary artificial intelligence methods and that such analyses complement contemporary models relying on socio-economic and survey-based responses. FC signatures from retrieval, empathy, and monetary reward tasks are identified as important and powerful predictors of conservatism, and activations of the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus are most strongly associated with political affiliation. Although the direction of causality is unclear, this study suggests that the biological and neurological roots of political behavior run much deeper than previously thought.
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Project description:Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has presented a global pandemic in 2020 and 2021, and has therefore spurred a flurry of research, whether related directly to the disease and its treatment or regarding its spread, containment, and effect on everyday lives. In particular, two pressing streams of research have investigated antecedents to COVID-19 preventative behaviors and vaccination intentions. This nascent research has led to many interesting and practically important findings, however, there remains many segmented, compartmentalized studies that address topics that, while certainly generative and meaningful, may not provide a full lens to possible antecedents. The current study takes an interdisciplinary approach that investigates commonly studied variables from biology and public health, political science, and psychology as they relate to COVID-19 preventative behaviors and vaccine intentions in a stratified sample of South Carolina residents (N = 1695). Results from correlations and multiple regression substantiated the findings of many previous studies, however, it was found that, when controlling for shared variance among predictors via relative weights analysis, COVID-19 knowledge, trust in science, age, and Trump approval were the strongest predictors of preventative behaviors. Alternatively, trust in science, gender, age, and conservatism were the strongest predictors of vaccine intentions. Understanding the variables that contribute to the practice of preventative behaviors and vaccine intentions can be used by public health officials to better target and tailor their educational campaign in the community.
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