Affective Partisan Polarization and Moral Dilemmas During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Affective polarization influences how people interact in everyday life. But how far does the dislike of political opponents go? We study a moral dilemma that gained attention in the media and broader population during the COVID-19 pandemic: triage decisions on the allocation of intensive medical care. Deploying a forced-choice conjoint experiment embedded in online surveys in Brazil, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United States, we study the influence of patient characteristics on participants' prioritization for access to intensive medical care. The results indicate that participants follow a utilitarian heuristic, favoring patients with higher chances of survival, of young age, medical front-line workers, and those with children. However, across all contexts we find robust evidence that revealed partisanship of the patient plays a role in these ethical decisions: Supporters of left or right political camps are more likely to withhold support to patients from the other political side, which right-party patients being particularly strongly penalized.