Noncompliance with Masking as a Coalitional Signal to US Conservatives in a Pandemic.

Humans have evolved perceptual acuity toward environmental cues heuristically associated with communicable disease that elicits an aversion. One heuristic cue that humans utilize to infer contamination threat is ingroup-outgroup status, with prejudices arising toward outgroup members due to potential novel pathogen exposure. The current study sought to investigate how disease responses in the US population have been modulated by the COVID-19 pandemic, given its origins in China, an outgroup population.