Americans’ Responses to COVID-19 and the Conditional Role of Dispositional Needs for Security: A Replication and Extension

Abstract A predominant theory in political psychology proposes that the political right is more threat sensitive than the political left due to differences in needs for security. Yet, in a prototypical case study of the threat-politics link, Americans’ responses to COVID-19 deviated from this expectation. In this research note, we demonstrate that this phenomenon can be understood by accounting for the role of partisan sorting and political engagement in translating dispositional needs for security into political preferences. Across six national surveys (combined N = 8,687), we demonstrate that psychological needs for security are indeed associated with protective COVID-19 responses, but only among politically disengaged Americans. For politically engaged Americans, increased security needs were associated with sorting into right-wing discourses that, in turn, promoted lax COVID-19 responses. Our findings demonstrate that dispositional security needs conditionally affect political attitudes but cast doubt on the claim that attitudinal differences will necessarily manifest behaviorally.