What Post-Pandemic Paradox?

Given the importance of the credibility and effectiveness of health messaging during politicized public health events, this study explores both message source and message recipient factors in predicting perceived credibility and intent to comply with a COVID-19 mitigation message. Born out of disease avoidance, greater individual disgust sensitivity should lead to greater perceived risk and uptake of mitigation efforts. Meanwhile, conservative partisanship in the US has been associated with less perceived risk and behavioral compliance related to COVID-19. However, greater disgust, sensitivity, and political conservatism enjoy a positive relationship. To test this paradox, we explore both partisanship and disgust sensitivity, along with authoritarianism, to see which ultimately better predicts perceived credibility and intent to comply with government-issued COVID-19 guidance. We further explore partisanship by exploring how messages from the same (or different) political party influence message processing and effects. An online experiment with a US-based sample ( N = 424) found no influence of individuals’ political partisanship, but did find small (yet significant) effects such that messages from Democratic governors elicited greater intent to comply than Republican ones. Results about disgust sensitivity were mixed: greater pathogen disgust sensitivity was associated with greater perceived credibility of messages, whereas greater socio-moral disgust sensitivity was associated with greater intent to comply. Implications are discussed.