Public opinion around the COVID-19 pandemic is polarized along partisan lines and reflects individual dispositions such as ideology and worldviews. We turn prior research around by examining how the pandemic may influence political attitudes. Drawing on terror management theory, we test the possibility that prompting someone to think about the health implications of becoming ill with COVID 19 will make them more likely to adopt attitudes that reflect their worldviews. We hypothesize that exposure to a reminder of either the pandemic or of one’s own mortality will result in more positive views of immigrants among those low in social dominance orientation (SDO) and more negative views among those high in SDO compared to a control group. This hypothesis is tested with an experiment embedded in a national sample survey from June 2022. We conclude that reminders of the pandemic, just as other existential threats, increase political polarization around basic worldviews.
