Peter Ditto, professor of psychological science, is quoted in an opinion piece in the New York Times. An excerpt:
The “white male effect,” in turn, interacts with differing responses of men and women to the pandemic.
Peter Ditto, a psychologist at the University of California-Irvine, wrote me that
there is good evidence of sex differences in responses to the coronavirus; women are more likely to report favoring and practicing social distance measures than are men.
This, in turn, fits with “the general sense that liberals are the more ‘feminine’ of the two parties,” Ditto argues, which results in the following pattern:
While liberals adopt their nurturant role, bemoaning the climbing infection and death rates and are willing to accept economic carnage in favor of minimizing the loss of human life, conservatives are more likely to, in effect, tell the American people to “walk it off,” increasingly staking out the position that some loss of life must be endured for the greater economic good.
In addition, in Ditto’s view, there is a fundamental tension arising “from how the two sides view the value and integrity of scientists.” Conservatives, Ditto wrote, are
more likely to question conclusions of scientists because they are more likely to question their motives — seeing them as typical liberal pansies who just can’t accept the reality that people die. At the extreme, hard right conservative thinking manifests in conspiracy theories painting Fauci, the CDC and the WHO as malevolent agents whose hidden agendas having nothing to do with saving American lives.