Why partisans feel hated: Distinct static and dynamic relationships with animosity meta-perceptions.

Partisans hold inaccurate perceptions of the other side. What drives these inaccuracies? We address this question with a focus on partisan animosity meta-perceptions (i.e.

Conspiratorial thinking in a 50-state survey of American adults.

Background: While the NIMH Research Domain Criteria framework stresses understanding how neuropsychiatric phenotypes vary across populations, little is known outside of small clinical cohorts about conspiratorial thoughts as an aspect of cognition.

Methods: We conducted a 50-state non-probability internet survey conducted in 6 waves between October 6, 2022 and January 29, 2024, with respondents age 18 and older. Respondents completed the American Conspiratorial Thinking Scale (ACTS) and the 9-item Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9).

Illusory interparty disagreement: Partisans agree on what hate speech to censor but do not know it.

Whether and when to censor hate speech are long-standing points of contention in the US. The latest iteration of these debates entails grappling with content regulation on social media in an age of intense partisan polarization. But do partisans disagree about what types of hate speech to censor on social media or do they merely differ on how much hate speech to censor? And do they understand out-party censorship preferences? We examine these questions in a nationally representative conjoint survey experiment (participant = 3,357; decision = 40,284).

Trust in Physicians and Hospitals During the COVID-19 Pandemic in a 50-State Survey of US Adults.

Importance: Trust in physicians and hospitals has been associated with achieving public health goals, but the increasing politicization of public health policies during the COVID-19 pandemic may have adversely affected such trust.

Objective: To characterize changes in US adults' trust in physicians and hospitals over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and the association between this trust and health-related behaviors.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This survey study uses data from 24 waves of a nonprobability internet survey conducted between April 1, 2020, and January 31, 2024, among 443 455 unique respondents aged 18 years or older residing in the US, with state-level representative quotas for race and ethnicity, age, and gender.

Cognitive Symptoms of Post-COVID-19 Condition and Daily Functioning.

Importance: The frequent occurrence of cognitive symptoms in post-COVID-19 condition has been described, but the nature of these symptoms and their demographic and functional factors are not well characterized in generalizable populations.

Objective: To investigate the prevalence of self-reported cognitive symptoms in post-COVID-19 condition, in comparison with individuals with prior acute SARS-CoV-2 infection who did not develop post-COVID-19 condition, and their association with other individual features, including depressive symptoms and functional status.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Two waves of a 50-state nonprobability population-based internet survey conducted between December 22, 2022, and May 5, 2023.

Academics are more specific, and practitioners more sensitive, in forecasting interventions to strengthen democratic attitudes.

Concern over democratic erosion has led to a proliferation of proposed interventions to strengthen democratic attitudes in the United States. Resource constraints, however, prevent implementing all proposed interventions. One approach to identify promising interventions entails leveraging domain experts, who have knowledge regarding a given field, to forecast the effectiveness of candidate interventions.

A synthesis of evidence for policy from behavioural science during COVID-19.

Scientific evidence regularly guides policy decisions, with behavioural science increasingly part of this process. In April 2020, an influential paper proposed 19 policy recommendations ('claims') detailing how evidence from behavioural science could contribute to efforts to reduce impacts and end the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we assess 747 pandemic-related research articles that empirically investigated those claims.

Misinformation, Trust, and Use of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19.

Importance: The COVID-19 pandemic has been notable for the widespread dissemination of misinformation regarding the virus and appropriate treatment.

Objective: To quantify the prevalence of non-evidence-based treatment for COVID-19 in the US and the association between such treatment and endorsement of misinformation as well as lack of trust in physicians and scientists.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This single-wave, population-based, nonprobability internet survey study was conducted between December 22, 2022, and January 16, 2023, in US residents 18 years or older who reported prior COVID-19 infection.

Community Mobility and Depressive Symptoms During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States.

Importance: Marked elevation in levels of depressive symptoms compared with historical norms have been described during the COVID-19 pandemic, and understanding the extent to which these are associated with diminished in-person social interaction could inform public health planning for future pandemics or other disasters.

Objective: To describe the association between living in a US county with diminished mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic and self-reported depressive symptoms, while accounting for potential local and state-level confounding factors.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This survey study used 18 waves of a nonprobability internet survey conducted in the United States between May 2020 and April 2022.

Norm-violating rhetoric undermines support for participatory inclusiveness and political equality among Trump supporters.

Over the last decade, the United States has seen increasing antidemocratic rhetoric by political leaders. Yet, prior work suggests that such norm-violating rhetoric does not undermine support for democracy as a system of government. We argue that, while that may be true, such rhetoric does vitiate support for specific democratic principles.

Correcting misperceptions of the other political party does not robustly reduce support for undemocratic practices or partisan violence.

A growing consensus suggests that a cause of support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence is that partisans misperceive the other side. That is, they vastly exaggerate the extent to which members of the other party support undemocratic practices and violence. When these misperceptions are corrected, citizens' own beliefs moderate.

Correcting misperceptions of out-partisans decreases American legislators' support for undemocratic practices.

There is substantial concern about democratic backsliding in the United States. Evidence includes notably high levels of animosity toward out-partisans and support for undemocratic practices (SUP) among the general public. Much less is known, however, about the views of elected officials-even though they influence democratic outcomes more directly.

Media use and vaccine resistance.

Public health requires collective action-the public best addresses health crises when individuals engage in prosocial behaviors. Failure to do so can have dire societal and economic consequences. This was made clear by the disjointed, politicized response to COVID-19 in the United States.

Interventions reducing affective polarization do not necessarily improve anti-democratic attitudes.

There is widespread concern that rising affective polarization-particularly dislike for outpartisans-exacerbates Americans' anti-democratic attitudes. Accordingly, scholars and practitioners alike have invested great effort in developing depolarization interventions that reduce affective polarization. Critically, however, it remains unclear whether these interventions reduce anti-democratic attitudes, or only change sentiments towards outpartisans.

Cognitive-motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts.

Healthy democratic polities feature competing visions of a good society but also require some level of cooperation and institutional trust. Democracy is at risk when citizens become so polarized that an 'us versus them' mentality dominates. Despite a vast multidisciplinary literature, no coherent conceptual framework of the microlevel dynamics that increase or decrease polarization has been presented.

Correcting inaccurate metaperceptions reduces Americans' support for partisan violence.

Scholars, policy makers, and the general public have expressed growing concern about the possibility of large-scale political violence in the United States. Prior research substantiates these worries, as studies reveal that many American partisans support the use of violence against rival partisans. Here, we propose that support for partisan violence is based in part on greatly exaggerated perceptions of rival partisans’ support for violence.

Elite party cues increase vaccination intentions among Republicans.

Overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic requires motivating the vast majority of Americans to get vaccinated. However, vaccination rates have become politically polarized, and a substantial proportion of Republicans have remained vaccine hesitant for months. Here, we explore how endorsements by party elites affect Republicans' COVID-19 vaccination intentions and attitudes.

Affective polarization, local contexts and public opinion in America.

Affective polarization has become a defining feature of twenty-first-century US politics, but we do not know how it relates to citizens' policy opinions. Answering this question has fundamental implications not only for understanding the political consequences of polarization, but also for understanding how citizens form preferences. Under most political circumstances, this is a difficult question to answer, but the novel coronavirus pandemic allows us to understand how partisan animus contributes to opinion formation.

Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping.