Highlighting the Old in the “New Normal”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a wide ideological gap frustrated an effective response to the health crisis. Whereas most liberals supported protective measures, many conservatives opposed them. Five studies ( N total = 3,090) demonstrate that American and German conservatives’ opposition to COVID-19 measures arose partially from nostalgic emotions. We show that framing COVID-19 measures as a return to the past reduces conservatives’ opposition to face masks and vaccinations. An internal meta-analysis shows that although the overall effect of temporal framing is significant, it is small. This research identifies conservatives’ focus on the past as a theoretically relevant antecedent to their opposition to COVID-19 measures and introduces temporal framing as a small but practically feasible strategy to reduce such opposition.