The unique roles of threat perception and misinformation accuracy judgments in the relationship between political orientation and COVID-19 health behaviors

Not everyone engages in COVID-19 related preventative health behaviors (PHB; e.g., mask wearing, social distancing) despite their demonstrated effectiveness for mitigating the spread of COVID-19. In the United States, for instance, PHBs emerged as (and remain) a partisan issue. The current work examines partisan gaps in PHB by considering both informational and perceptual factors related to COVID-19. Specifically, we focus on politically motivated belief in COVID-19 (mis)information and simultaneously consider the roles of physical threat and disgust perception. We find that poor performance in misinformation accuracy judgments and subsequently lower COVID-19 threat perceptions sequentially predict less PHB engagement. In Study 1 (N = 87 US undergraduate students), higher conservatism predicted lower COVID-19 threat perceptions but not COVID-19 disgust perceptions. Study 2 (N = 168 US undergraduate students) replicated this effect, while demonstrating that the relationship between stronger conservatism and lower engagement in PHB was mediated by higher accuracy judgments of COVID-19 misinformation and, in turn, lower perceptions of COVID-19 threat but not disgust. This suggests that considering threat perception is essential to understanding how politically motivated endorsement of COVID-19 misinformation shapes PHB.