While some politicians around the world appealed to people’s sense of community and solidarity in order to fight the pandemic, others seemed to prefer to let the virus run its course in hopes of herd immunity and better economic outcomes. This polarization was, for example, evident in politicians’ communication. These attitudes are not only relevant to an individual’s behavior but were a source of great political polarization in different countries around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only painfully reminded us that diseases are part of a human’s life and death, but was also a real-time experiment in disease-related attitude formation and change. Moreover, it significantly predicted conservative attitudes, even after controlling for Social Dominance Orientation. Importantly, the scale significantly predicted people’s protective behavior during the Pandemic over and above general social Darwinism. Results indicate that DRSD is meaningful related to other central political attitudes like Social Dominance Orientation, Authoritarianism and neoliberalism. In two countries ( N = 300, N = 533), we introduce and provide evidence for the reliability, validity, and usefulness of the Disease-Related Social Darwinism (DRSD) Short Scale measuring this concept. One of these attitudes is Social Darwinism, which holds that a pandemic benefits society by enabling nature “to weed out the weak”. Not only are these attitudes relevant to an individual’s self-protective behavior, but they also seem to be associated with social and political attitudes more broadly. It was also a live experiment in the formation and alteration of disease-related attitudes. COVID-19 was a harsh reminder that diseases are an aspect of human existence and mortality.
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