Getting Conservatives and Liberals to Agree on the COVID-19 Threat

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, political ideology has been perhaps the strongest predictor of consumers’ perceptions of the coronavirus’s threat. This article demonstrates that differences between conservatives’ and liberals’ responses to COVID-19 are mitigated when people perceive the virus itself to have agency. We propose that conservatives are generally more sensitive to threats that are relatively high (vs. low) in agency. Consequently, we find that greater perceived agency of the coronavirus increases its perceived threat among conservatives but not liberals, and that this interaction is driven by differences in the tendency to attribute responsibility to agential entities. We also explore the effect of these malleable threat perceptions on downstream consequences related to the pandemic, including planned in-person consumption frequency. This research offers public health officials, policy makers, and firms insight into how to communicate more effectively about the pandemic and contributes theoretically to the literature on political ideology and threat sensitivity.