politicians they already endorse vs. the opposition? The results confirmed this prediction: both Democrat/Labour and Republican/Conservative partisans supported a Covid-19 mitigation policy more when it came from their own party compared to the opposition. This was partly due to trust in one’s own group and distrust in the out-group. Even more importantly, they showed that the public supports and trusts the policies proposed by non-partisan experts more than they trust policies proposed by their party of preference. This is an important finding”, says Dr Jiga-Boy, “because it contradicts the popular belief that the general public has ‘had enough of experts’. In fact, in times of crisis such as this, it shows that the public might have ‘had enough’ of partisan politics and politicians instead. “This project is a tremendous group effort, with colleagues from universities around the world”, continues Dr Jiga-Boy. “I received £3,672 from Swansea University’s Greatest Need Fund, which we used in April 2020 for participant payment for one experiment conducted in the US 1 and two studies in the UK 2 . The protocol, materials and data analysis plan were pre-registered prior to data collection 3 and the first article will be submitted for peer-review shortly.” "This funding was essential for enabling us to collect data in such a short time. Typically, it takes much time, effort, and money to recruit large enough samples of participants. The urgency and ephemerality of this pandemic have put extra pressures on our work, and we could not have collected such good quality data without the help from alumni and friends who supported the Greatest Need Fund. Simply put, it allowed us to do so much in so little time. In an ideal world, any researcher would need this kind of help to advance knowledge. We
PRO-SOCIAL RESPONSES TO COVID-19
In March 2020, alumni donations allowed Dr Gabriela Jiga-Boy to initiate a project on ‘fostering prosocial responses to the Covid-19 pandemic’, combining social psychology and political science. Many topics are polarized along party lines: the ‘party over policy effect’ illustrates that people’s preferences for political parties will make them more likely to support policies proposed by that party compared to the same policy proposed by the opposition. For example, in the US at least, people will be more likely to endorse a climate change policy if it is proposed by their own party, even though the policy may benefit society as a whole. This effect can be detrimental to public compliance with recommendations to manage the Covid-19 pandemic. Dr Jiga-Boy and collaborators were interested in whether the public response to the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK and the US was a partisan issue: are people more likely to support the recommendations when these come from
are grateful that this time we had this help." 1 (N = 2000, Cloud Research’s Prime Panels) 2 (N = ~1000 each, Prolific Academic) 3 https://osf.io/75h3p
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