I hate you when I am anxious: The effect of anxiety during the COVID-19 epidemic on ideological hostility

An extensive body of research published around the world during the past several months of the COVID-19 pandemic attests to an increase in symptoms of anxiety and fear among the population at large. It goes without saying that this change does not bode well for people’s mental health. However, its implications are more far-reaching, posing a threat to the entire social fabric, including relationships between political or ideological groups. In two studies conducted during COVID-19, one in Israel and the other in the U.S., we found that high anxiety levels are associated with higher levels of hatred towards ordinary people from the respective political outgroup, lower levels of willingness to initiate or sustain interpersonal relations with those people (i.e., greater social distance) and greater support for exclusionist policies towards those people. We have also provided evidence that the mechanism behind these relationships is perception of threat posed by the political outgroup. Put differentlly, the perception of threat from the political outgroup is strengthened with the rising anxiety level, leading to hatred, social distancing and exclusionist policy support. Theoretically, we know that anxiety can potentially lead to increased sensitivity to, or overestimation of, threats. It is also known that threat perceptions can increase hatred, intolerance and exclusionist tendencies towards the source of threat. However, most literature on inter-party hostility has thus far explored this relationship within the same domain (i.e., anxiety on account of X relates to perceptions of threat from X and hostility towards the same X). This study is the first to examine a mechanism pivoting on perceived threat from the political outgroup during the current pandemic, when the anxiety is driven by an external threat that is largely unrelated (or at least not directly related) to the context of inter-group relations. We concluded that, in the extreme circumstances that the United States were faced with, on account of both the pandemic (i.e., the acute escalation in COVID-19 casualties) and the socio-political factors (i.e., two weeks after the storming of the U.S. Capitol and several days before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden), anxiety in the health domain might have infected the political domain, increasing people’s hostility towards the outgroup. The implication of such mechanism may go beyond the relationship between anxiety due to COVID-19 and inter-party relations. Most importantly, it means that times of economic, health, political or other crisis creates a fertile ground for the development of hatred and animosity that go beyond the groups that are perceived as relevant for the creation of the specific crisis. Societies and leaders, should be aware of these potentially destructive implications, and take some preventive steps to moderate them. In this sense, the findings presented here can be extrapolated to different anxiety-triggering situations, different sources of perceived threat, and hostility towards different groups that are thought to pose such a threat. This dynamic, however, requires further research.