Temporal changes in white and Asian Americans’ intergroup behavior across the pandemic

Prior work has shown that when macro-level events threaten a group’s status, discriminatory behavior increases, but we know less about when such threats elicit ingroup favoritism versus outgroup prejudice. We argue that the nature of discrimination depends, in part, on whether people are responding to a threat during a period of higher or lower levels of societal strain. We test this with identical experiments run at two time points: one during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (a period of high ambient threat) and one post-pandemic (lower ambient threat). We primed participants with threatening information and then measured White and Asian Americans’ prosocial behavior toward ingroup versus outgroup targets. We find that the same threat prime elicits White Americans’ outgroup prejudice under high ambient threat, but their behavior shifted toward ingroup favoritism under low threat context. Asian Americans, on the other hand, responded to threat primes with increased generosity toward outgroups, even when the imminent threat of COVID-19 had faded. These results show that discrimination is context-contingent, clarifying when threat cues escalate hostility beyond mere ingroup preference.