Dataset Information

The political polarization of COVID-19 treatments among physicians and laypeople in the United States.

ABSTRACT: In the United States, liberals and conservatives disagree about facts. To what extent does expertise attenuate these disagreements? To study this question, we compare the polarization of beliefs about COVID-19 treatments among laypeople and critical care physicians. We find that political ideology predicts both groups' beliefs about a range of COVID-19 treatments. These associations persist after controlling for a rich set of covariates, including local politics. We study two potential explanations: a) that partisans are exposed to different information and b) that they interpret the same information in different ways, finding evidence for both. Polarization is driven by preferences for partisan cable news but not by exposure to scientific research. Using a set of embedded experiments, we demonstrate that partisans perceive scientific evidence differently when it pertains to a politicized treatment (ivermectin), relative to when the treatment is not identified. These results highlight the extent to which political ideology is increasingly relevant for understanding beliefs, even among expert decision makers such as physicians.

SUBMITTER: Levin JM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9963903 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The political polarization of COVID-19 treatments among physicians and laypeople in the United States.

Levin Joel M JM Bukowski Leigh A LA Minson Julia A JA Kahn Jeremy M JM

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20230208 7

In the United States, liberals and conservatives disagree about facts. To what extent does expertise attenuate these disagreements? To study this question, we compare the polarization of beliefs about COVID-19 treatments among laypeople and critical care physicians. We find that political ideology predicts both groups' beliefs about a range of COVID-19 treatments. These associations persist after controlling for a rich set of covariates, including local politics. We study two potential explanati ...[more]

PMID: 36753464

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Project description:BackgroundBased on individual-level studies, previous literature suggested that conservatives and liberals in the United States had different perceptions and behaviors when facing the COVID-19 threat. From a state-level perspective, this study further explored the impact of personal political ideology disparity on COVID-19 transmission before and after the emergence of Omicron.MethodsA new index was established, which depended on the daily cumulative number of confirmed cases in each state and the corresponding population size. Then, by using the 2020 United States presidential election results, the values of the built index were further divided into two groups concerning the political party affiliation of the winner in each state. In addition, each group was further separated into two parts, corresponding to the time before and after Omicron predominated. Three methods, i.e., functional principal component analysis, functional analysis of variance, and function-on-scalar linear regression, were implemented to statistically analyze and quantify the impact.ResultsFindings reveal that the disparity of personal political ideology has caused a significant discrepancy in the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. Specifically, the findings show that at the very early stage before the emergence of Omicron, Democratic-leaning states suffered from a much greater severity of the COVID-19 threat but, after July 2020, the severity of COVID-19 transmission in Republican-leaning states was much higher than that in Democratic-leaning states. Situations were reversed when the Omicron predominated. Most of the time, states with Democrat preferences were more vulnerable to the threat of COVID-19 than those with Republican preferences, even though the differences decreased over time.ConclusionsThe individual-level disparity of political ideology has impacted the nationwide COVID-19 transmission and such findings are meaningful for the government and policymakers when taking action against the COVID-19 crisis in the United States.

Dataset Information

The political polarization of COVID-19 treatments among physicians and laypeople in the United States.

Publications

The political polarization of COVID-19 treatments among physicians and laypeople in the United States.

Similar Datasets

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