Beyond Wishful Thinking during the COVID-19 Pandemic: How Hope Reduces the Effects of Death Arousal on Hostility toward Outgroups among Conservative and Liberal Media Users for COVID-19 Information

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has made death more salient to individuals, which has partly contributed to the amplification of hostility toward others who have different perspectives from oneself. Recognizing that the politicization of COVID-19 and the resulting polarization have become increasingly critical issues, this study investigates how death-related thinking and hope about the pandemic can affect hostility toward outgroups as well as how conservative and liberal media usages moderate the indirect effects of hope. An online survey experiment of people in the U.S. (N = 759) during the pandemic showed that death arousal reduced hope and that these low levels of hope exacerbated hostility toward outgroups in the pandemic context, confirming the positive impact of hope. Importantly, however, our study did not show that hope had a beneficial impact for heavy conservative media users.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Typically, delay tasks are used in TMT protocols to induce the distal effects of mortality salience on defensive attitudes or behaviors, in the sense that unconscious death-related thinking results in attitudes that defend against existential anxiety (see Burke et al., 2010 for a meta-analysis showing the effects of delay tasks between mortality salience and defensive attitudes or behaviors). Given that this study focused on measuring the sequential effects of mortality salience on hopeful feelings and outgroup hostility as a defensive attitude, we did not apply a purposeful delay or distraction between mortality salience and hopeful feelings. Lambert et al.’s (2014) study, which examined the effects of mortality salience on the activation of emotions (negative affect in their study), took a similar approach, omitting delay tasks and instead directly measuring self-reported emotions right after the mortality salience task. Finally, it warrants mention, that researchers still disagree about whether delays are necessary to increase accessibility to death-related thoughts (Trafimow & Hughes, 2012).

2. Our selections of Breitbart and FOX News as conservative-leaning media and CNNand MSNBC as liberal-leaning media were based on a Gallup survey (Gallup, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ewha Womans University