Scapegoating of the Unvaccinated and the Role of Political Ideology

An essential component of scapegoating is that one group is blamed, potentially unfairly, and evaluated in negative ways for causing societal harm. We theorized that people will be more likely to scapegoat unvaccinated individuals (vs. vaccinated) and that liberals will be more likely to scapegoat the unvaccinated (vs. vaccinated) individuals. In contrast, conservatives will not differ in their scapegoating of these different groups. Our three studies (N = 1,142 collected in January of 2022) used vignette-based information featuring characters of varying risk profiles (e.g., an older adult with comorbidities who did not get vaccinated and a physically fit, not at-risk youth working alone, who has also recovered from C19). We demonstrated that people scapegoat the unvaccinated individuals regardless of the risk profile or COVID-19 recovery status of the person they evaluated. We showed that political ideology consistently moderated this relationship.