Addressing the effect of concern with COVID-19 threat on prejudice towards immigrants: The sequential mediating role of need for cognitive closure and desire for cultural tightness.

The link between threat and anti-immigrant prejudice is well-established. Relatedly, recent research has also shown that situational threats (such as concern with COVID-19 threat) increase anti-immigrant prejudice through the mediating role of desire for cultural tightness. This study aims to further our understanding of the psychological processes underlying the relation between concern with COVID-19 threat and increased negative attitudes towards immigrants by considering the mediational role of an individual epistemic motivation (i.e., the need for cognitive closure). A study was conducted on a large sample of Italian respondents covering all the Italian regions. Findings revealed that high concern with COVID-19 threat led to increased negative attitudes towards immigrants through the sequential mediating role of higher need for cognitive closure, leading in turn to higher desire for cultural tightness. Implications of these findings for a timely contextualized study of anti-immigrant prejudice will be highlighted.

People Who Need People (and Some Who Think They Don't): On Compensatory Personal and Social Means of Goal Pursuit

We propose a new theoretical model depicting the compensatory relations between personal agency and social assistance. It suggests two general hypotheses, namely that (1) the stronger the individuals’ sense of personal agency, the weaker their motivation to utilize social assistance and the greater their consequent tendency to develop anti-social attitudes. Conversely, (2) the stronger the individuals’ reliance on social assistance, the weaker their motivation to be agentic, and the lesser their tendency to develop a strong sense of self. These relations are assumed to apply across levels of generality, that is, concerning agency and assistance within a single goal domain, as well as across domains where the source of agency (e.g., money, power) or assistance facilitates the attainment of multiple goals.At the time of this writing, the world finds itself in the grip of an unprecedented calamity: the COVID 19 pandemic, the worst such outbreak in living memory. Starting at the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, the virus spread quickly across the planet. Over 37 million persons, globally, have been infected so far and the worst may be yet to come. Over 7.6 million Americans were infected, and over 214,000 died as a consequence. Millions are expected to succumb to the plague, the world economy is taking a historic hit. People are losing jobs, some to be never recovered. Factories and small business are shuttered, many to never reopen. Health systems of the world’s nations are stretched to their limits, social services and functions (transportation, education, entertainment, leisure) are near paralysis. Millions are cooped up in their homes: lonely and disoriented, the structures of their daily routines in shambles. Nobody is exempt. All are vulnerable.These somber circumstances induce a sense of fragility and helplessness in millions of individuals. Their sense of personal agency is severely threatened, their need for assistance and support is much magnified. And a fundamental question to psychological science is what impact this has on people’s social relations, their attachment to others, their interpersonal orientations, and their attitudes. In the present article, we address such questions by reviewing an extensive body of relevant empirical findings in the social psychological literature and proposing an integrative model that offers new perspectives on the phenomena at stake.

Perceived COVID-19 Threat and Reactions to Noncompliant Health-Protective Behaviors: The Mediating Role of Desired Cultural Tightness and the Moderating Role of Age.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a health crisis that requires individuals to comply with many health-protective behaviors. Following the previous literature, cultural tightness has been found to be a key mechanism to increase coordination in order to mitigate collective threats (e.g., COVID-19). In this study, we test a moderated mediation model to examine whether the perceived COVID-19 threat could intensify the extent of desired tightness (i.e., a personal desire for cultural tightness), moderated by age. Subsequently, we test whether this could intensify individuals' emotional reactions to non-compliance with COVID-19 health protective behaviors. The study relies on a cross-sectional design, with a sample of 624 participants residing in central Italy (i.e., Lazio). The data were collected from February to October 2021. Questionnaires contained self-reporting measures of the perceived COVID-19 threat, desired tightness, and personal emotional reactions to non-compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures (e.g., wearing a mask). The results confirm that the perceived COVID-19 threat is associated with an increase in the desire for cultural tightness-and that this relationship was moderated by age-and, consequently, with intolerance for noncompliance with preventive behaviors. Additionally, both direct and indirect effects of the perceived COVID-19 threat on negative emotional reactions to noncompliance were significant; this indirect effect was larger at high (+1 SD) age than at low (-1 SD) age. Overall, this research provides some insight into how people can respond to the current pandemic threat, and how this may have implications for violating rules and regulations to keep contagion under control.

Concern with COVID-19 pandemic threat and attitudes towards immigrants: The mediating effect of the desire for tightness.

Tightening social norms is thought to be adaptive for dealing with collective threat yet it may have negative consequences for increasing prejudice. The present research investigated the role of desire for cultural tightness, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, in increasing negative attitudes towards immigrants. We used participant-level data from 41 countries (N = 55,015) collected as part of the PsyCorona project, a cross-national longitudinal study on responses to COVID-19. Our predictions were tested through multilevel and SEM models, treating participants as nested within countries. Results showed that people's concern with COVID-19 threat was related to greater desire for tightness which, in turn, was linked to more negative attitudes towards immigrants. These findings were followed up with a longitudinal model (N = 2,349) which also showed that people's heightened concern with COVID-19 in an earlier stage of the pandemic was associated with an increase in their desire for tightness and negative attitudes towards immigrants later in time. Our findings offer insight into the trade-offs that tightening social norms under collective threat has for human groups.

The Mediational Role of Desire for Cultural Tightness on Concern With COVID-19 and Perceived Self-Control.

When ecological threats are more severe or prevalent, societies are more likely to tighten their social norms and punishments. Moreover, when people follow clear and tight rules, they are more prone to regulate their behavior (i.e., self-control) in order to avoid punishment. Therefore, we examined the mediating role of people's endorsement of cultural tightness (i.e., support and desire) on the relationship between concern with COVID-19 threat and personal self-control. Our hypothesis was tested through a mediation model in two studies with a sample of (N=315, 77.1% females, M age=23.71) university students (Study 1) and with a heterogeneous sample of (N=239, 65.7% females, M age=36.55) participants (Study 2). Empirical support for the proposed model was found in both studies. Implications of this research will be discussed. The main implication is related to the possibility that people's desire for strong norms to cope with the COVID-19 threat could promote greater self-regulated preventive behavior in order to protect their health.

COVID-19 and prejudice against migrants: the mediating roles of need for cognitive closure and binding moral foundations. A comparative study.

What mitigates prejudice against migrants in situations of uncertainty? Addressing this question, we explored how individuals with greater COVID-19 concern perceive migrants as a greater threat and show prejudice against them, indirectly through the mechanism of need for cognitive closure and binding moral foundations.This study was conducted in two European countries: Malta and Italy. Six hundred and seventy-six individuals participated in this quantitative study (Malta: N = 204; Italy N = 472). Results from this study showed that the need for cognitive closure and binding moral foundations mediate the relationship between COVID-19 concern and prejudice against migrants in both countries. When testing the three binding moral foundations (loyalty, authority, and purity), the authority foundation seems to be the most consistent predictor.The implications of the findings contribute to theories about how situational uncertainty caused by COVID-19, together with the need for epistemic certainty and binding morality, contribute to increased prejudiced attitudes against migrants.