The dual process model of ideology and prejudice (Duckitt, 2001) proposed that BDW and BCW are key psychological drivers of two distinct yet correlated forms of prejudice. BDW, which is rooted in elevated safety-related threat perception, should increase (right-wing) authoritarianism (Duckitt et al., 2002), whereas BCW, which is rooted in competition over resources and competition with others, would reinforce views of the world as hierarchical, expressed as social dominance orientation (Duckitt et al., 2002). In fact, a meta-analysis of 46 studies (Perry et al., 2013) testing the Dual Process Model of Ideology and Prejudice suggested BDW relates to increased right-wing authoritarianism, whereas BCW relates to increased social dominance orientation.

Since the original conceptualization of this model, extensive research has linked BDW and BCW with these and other psychological outcomes. BDW has been linked with an increased sensitivity to threats, which often leads to behaviors that aim to increase perceived safety. Examples include owning a firearm (Stroebe et al., 2017), perceiving one’s country ingroup as superior to others in an effort to cope with this elevated threat perception (Syropoulos, 2021), as well as an increased endorsement of binding moral foundations (i.e., considering purity, loyalty to the ingroup and deference to the ingroup more in one’s moral decision making; Leone et al., 2019). Further, although not directly linked to prejudice it is possible that BDW, via its robust link with right-wing authoritarianism, could reinforce intergroup hostility and prejudiced attitudes indirectly. Research has found that right-wing authoritarianism predicts increased support for war (Crowson, 2009), as well as sexist (Austin & Jackson, 2019) and racist (Duriez & Soenens, 2009) attitudes.

BCW also has the potential to influence behaviors and attitudes. It relates to a greater likelihood to engage in corrupt behavior (Vilanova et al., 2022), an increased tendency to fake one’s qualifications in selective processes (Roulin & Krings, 2016), and a decreased endorsement of individualizing moral foundations (i.e., less consideration of fairness and harm to others when making moral judgements; Leone et al., 2019). Similar to BDW, it is probable that BCW could indirectly reinforce intergroup hostility and prejudice, through its robust link with increased endorsement of social dominance orientation. Extant research connects social dominance orientation with most of the same outcomes as authoritarianism (Bergh et al., 2016), such as discrimination towards outgroups, particularly those perceived as socially inferior to the dominant group (Hindriks et al., 2014), oppressive attitudes towards minority groups (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999; Sidanius et al., 2017), xenophobia (Uenal et al., 2021), and racist attitudes (Ho et al., 2015).

Despite the aforementioned evidence stemming from the model proposed by Duckitt and colleagues (2002) illustrating the consequences of endorsing these two worldviews, less work has focused on what shapes people’s worldviews and whether (and why) they fluctuate over time. This gap in research could be due in part to the influence of early theorization about worldviews. Such work viewed these beliefs as constructs which were generally considered stable interpretations/beliefs about our social world and people in it (e.g., Ross, 1993). However, we argue understanding why worldviews change is important, as they can shape perceptions of outgroups and increase prejudice (Sibley et al., 2007; Sibley & Duckitt, 2013) thus having a strong influence on intergroup relations. We expected to see an increase in both BDW and BCW during the first year of COVID-19. We were expecting an increase because of the uncertainty and threat that was generated by COVID-19. Aside from the unprecedented changes in society, ranging from elevated health concerns and mortality rates to significant economic consequences with unemployment rates increasing drastically to nearly 15% during April 2020 (also see Pew Research Center, 2021 for an account of the impacts of COVID-19 on people’s lives), several major events took place during the first year of COVID-19 that could have made salient economic or safety related threats, thus increasing BCW and BDW respectively.

First, the pandemic became politicized (e.g., Flores et al., 2022), leading to increased tension and animosity between parties (Connaughton, 2021; Jungkunz, 2021). Overlapping in time with the coronavirus pandemic, the murder of George Floyd sparked protests across the nation as the Black Lives Matter movement grew throughout the summer of 2020, peaking in June but continuing throughout the year. These protests were often met with violence from police and counter-protesters. In November, the presidential election led to accusations of election fraud, and in January 2021 the U.S. Capitol was attacked by rioters who tried to overturn the election. These were all events which could have made salient views of the world that were rooted in threat (BDW) or competition (BCW) and longitudinally studying worldviews during this time period provided an important test of their malleability or stability. It also allowed us to examine what kinds of people (if any) showed substantial shifts in worldviews over time. A timeline of these major events is provided in Figure 1.

Importantly, this study and expectation of change in worldviews differs from existing research, which highlights the relative stability of worldviews. For example, one investigation which examined the stability of these worldviews was a longitudinal study by Sibley and colleagues (2007) where the researchers found that these worldviews are extremely stable across the span of five months, observing test-retest correlations of up to .93 (Sibley et al., 2007, p. 366). In another longitudinal investigation by Sibley and Duckitt (2013) these worldviews again emerge as relatively stable, as across the span of one year, correlations between the worldviews are strong (rs > .60), and any mean differences are below 0.20. Further evidence for the relative stability of worldviews can be obtained from research on primal world beliefs.¹1

Primals are defined as “beliefs specific to the overall character of the world rather than particular topics within it—that is, only beliefs about everything” (Clifton et al., 2019).

Nevertheless none of the aforementioned evidence has considered changes during a time of uncertainty specifically for worldviews (which are similar to but conceptually different from primals). Further, and to the best of our knowledge, no investigation has utilized a nationally representative sample capable of generalizing findings to the U.S. population and across a larger timespan, which would allow for the generalization of patterns of changes in worldviews to a larger swath of the U.S. population and across a larger timespan. Thus, the difference between these studies and our own is that we are explicitly focusing on two worldviews, during a one-year period when many people living in the U.S. were experiencing uncertainty and unprecedented events which could influence their respective worldviews. The degree to which this stability is observed in dangerous and competitive worldviews for a longer period of time, during a time when we would expect to see changes in BDW and BCW, and in a sample from which more generalizable conclusions can be reached (i.e., a non-probability, large and highly-powered sample), has remained mostly unexplored.²2

Studies by Sibley and colleagues (2007), although informative for our hypothesis, used samples that were not generalizable (i.e., it was not a nationally representative sample, but rather a community sample), and relatively small (N = 247). Similar arguments could be raised for the findings from Clifton et al.’s work on primals, in which samples were relatively small (Ns ranging from 122 to 398) and from convenience samples. In the current investigation we address these gaps by examining change in worldviews in a large and nationally representative U.S. sample, across the span of one year. Even within the early stages of COVID-19 a study looking at the stability of primals had a crowdsourced sample rather than a representative one (Ludwig et al., 2023).

Drawing on evidence from integrated threat theory (Stephan & Stephan, 2000), research from the dual process model of ideology and prejudice (Duckitt, 2001; Duckitt & Sibley, 2017) and foundational research on authoritarianism (e.g., Cohrs, 2013; Feldman & Stenner, 1997) we posit that threats experienced during the first year of the pandemic could cause shifts in people’s worldviews. Integrated threat theory posits that realistic and symbolic threats influence intergroup perceptions. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, uncertainty was rampant, with threats noted to both our physical health, as deaths and infections increased, and our economic standing as businesses shut down and the economy came to a halt. Research from authoritarianism (e.g., Cohrs, 2013; Feldman & Stenner, 1997) and the dual process model of ideology and prejudice (e.g., Duckitt, 2001; Duckitt & Sibley, 2017) in turn posits that worldviews rooted in threat (i.e., BDW and BCW) are predictive of prejudice and authoritarianism, and that during times of uncertainty, people turn to strong leaders to alleviate such feelings. Thus, relying on such extant writings, we too theorize that the inherent uncertainty produced by COVID-19, coupled with the (realistic) threats that individuals experienced, could shift worldviews predictive of prejudice.

To the best of our knowledge, empirical work on which factors could lead to changes in worldviews has been sparse. However, we can theorize about who might experience changes in their worldviews based on existing work on threat perception. The COVID-19 pandemic posed an unprecedented public health threat. It was also an economic threat (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2022) and an existential threat (Pyszczynski et al., 2021). Thus, if we were to conceptualize the endorsement of BDW and BCW as elevated threat perception, then we can theorize about who might potentially see the world as more dangerous or competitive. Such research highlights that individuals with a more conservative political ideology are sensitive to threats to their physical safety (e.g., Crawford, 2017). Since sensitivity to violence or threats to safety appears to be associated with more cultural right-wing belief (Brandt et al., 2021) it is possible that in the United States, those who hold more conservative or right-wing beliefs (usually Republicans) would experience greater increases in their worldviews.

However, the multifaceted nature of societal threat during the coronavirus epidemic means that other variables beyond ideology may be important to investigate. People’s age and race are also important in the U.S. context because of different threats from coronavirus and also differing perspectives on political protest and instability (in both the Black Lives Matters protest, and the attack on the U.S. capital). Other research has found that older age was associated with greater concern about the personal health risks associated with the coronavirus with significant differences between those aged 18-29 and all older age groups, with the highest likelihood of reporting personal concern (Niño et al., 2021). Similarly, Naeim and colleagues (2021) found that those aged 65 or older were significantly more likely to indicate they were very concerned about COVID-19 as compared with those aged 18-40).

Race is another crucial factor worth considering. During this period, inequalities present in American society rose to the forefront. Extant research finds that white Americans are defensive and often feel threatened in response to changing in the racial status quo (Krosch et al., 2022). It is thus possible that the salience of these inequalities acted as a threat and reinforced threatening worldviews in white Americans. Furthermore, nationally representative surveys spanning decades of data collected by the Pew Research Center (Pew Research Center, 2015) as well as more recent surveys (Pew Research Center, 2020) suggest that the Republican party tends to comprise more white and older party members than the Democratic party. Thus, we focused particularly on examining the extent to which ideology, age, and race predict changes in perceptions of the world as dangerous and competitive during the first year of the Coronavirus pandemic. We sought to test the influence of these factors both independently (i.e., in a bivariate fashion) but also after accounting for their intercorrelation, as at least in the U.S. these factors overlap with one another (i.e., members of the Republican party/political conservatives tend to be older and identify as white).

We also considered the possibility that exposure to and consumption of partisan media, especially right-leaning media, could also lead to increases in dangerous and competitive worldviews. During the COVID-19 pandemic, consumption of conservative media was negatively associated with engagement in protective behaviors (e.g., Borah et al., 2022) and positively associated with belief in conspiracies about COVID-19 (Stecula & Pickup, 2021). Existing research also suggests that the rhetoric present in right-wing media can reinforce defensive attitudes, heightening intergroup aggression (Wirz et al., 2018), increasing the appeal of right-wing populist leaders (e.g., Bos et al., 2011), and increase right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation (De Coninck et al., 2024). Considering the potential for consumption of right-wing media to exacerbate prejudicial beliefs, especially beliefs that are directly influenced by dangerous and competitive worldviews, we also examined whether participants who watched Fox News, one of the most popular right-wing media sources, also exhibited greater increases in how dangerous or competitive the world seemed in their eyes.

An additional parameter worth considering is people’s starting views of the world during a period of threat and potential worldview change. If people already see the world as a place that is very dangerous and/or competitive, it is possible that these beliefs would increase even more or alternatively stay consistent with their high levels of perceived dangerousness and competition. Conversely, it is possible that the world might become more dangerous and/or more competitive for those who do not already see it as such (i.e., those who initially endorse BDW and BCW to a lesser degree). Given the lack of pre-existing evidence, we explored the relationship between initial levels of BDW and BCW with change in these constructs in the current investigation.

The current investigation used a longitudinal design in a representative sample of 1600 U.S. citizens to investigate the stability of dangerous and competitive worldviews across a period of sixteen months. We opted to utilize a longitudinal design, as we consider it better suited to study and theorize about change over time, a phenomenon that cross-sectional designs cannot inherently and practically contribute towards. Further, the longitudinal design allowed us to study both within and between person changes in our focal outcomes. Because of the strong and diverse forms of threat occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic, we hypothesized that both BDW and BCW would increase across this 16-month period. We also investigated for whom such potential changes would be more prominent.

We first explored whether across the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, dangerous and competitive worldviews shifted. We hypothesized that because of the inherent uncertainty of this period, both dangerous and competitive worldviews would increase (H1). Further, we hypothesized that such changes would be more prominent for those more sensitive to threat, namely for older (H2a), white (H2b) and conservative (H2c) Americans. In a more exploratory fashion, we also examined whether existing levels of dangerous or competitive worldview endorsement would relate to higher or lower changes in each respective worldview. Notably, we had no a-priori expectation for the direction of this association, as both directions (i.e., a positive or a negative association) are plausible. We tested these hypotheses in a large, longitudinal, and nationally representative sample of Americans. Analyses for the current investigation were not pre-registered.

Some of the measures used in the current study have been utilized in other publications (Nteta et al., 2023; Reid et al., 2023), however, none of the conducted analyses are repeated. The full survey measures used in all four waves are available on Open Science Framework, along with the code relevant to this study (OSF: https://osf.io/nd486). The relevant measures used in this study are described below and described in detail in the Supplemental Online Materials (SOM) (see Syropoulos et al., 2025S).

Data were collected via a series of online surveys. These data were part of a larger investigation studying reactions to the coronavirus epidemic which sought to measure what predicts people’s behavior in the outbreak, their emotional and coping responses, and changes in their social attitudes. The current investigation used data from the first (April 2020) and fourth (August, 2021) timepoints of data collection. Participants completed online surveys at each point administered by YouGov, a market research and data analytics company. Each survey took approximately 25 minutes to complete, and participants were provided with 1500 YouGov ‘polling points’ which can be exchanged for small gifts or cash, with these points approximately being worth $1.50 USD. In these surveys, participants were asked a variety of questions, including measures relevant to the coronavirus, their social identities, personality traits, risk perceptions, social network composition, beliefs about election changes, competitive and dangerous worldviews, depression and anxiety, and demographic information.

A representative sample of adult participants was recruited from YouGov’s existing participant pool using stratified sampling based on demographic characteristics collected in the full 2016 American Community Survey. These responses were screened by YouGov before for quality for example by reviewing responses of those who responded too quickly, failed attention checks, open-ended responses, or identifying and removing responses with many missing responses. YouGov then provided us with a complete dataset with a total of 1,600 participants completed both T1 and T2. The sample consisted of 55% women and 45% men, ranging in age from 19-92; detailed demographic information is provided in Table 1.

A paired sample t-test was conducted to determine whether there were significant changes in BDW over the span of sixteen months (from T1 to T2). Overall, there was a significant increase of a small effect size in dangerous worldviews, t(1599) = 8.70, p < .001, d = .20. Participants’ BDW increased on average by 0.15 units from T1 (M = 3.29, SD = 0.70) to T2 (M = 3.44, SD = 0.75). Based on these comparisons, we calculated difference scores by subtracting the T1 scores from the T2 counterparts.

No significant difference, t(1599) = -0.68, p = .496, was observed for competitive worldviews. In fact, the average value was almost equal between scores in BCW at T1 (M = 2.73, SD = 0.73) and T2 (M = 2.72, SD = 0.73) was observed. Similar difference scores (to BDW) were also calculated for BCW.

Since we had no a-priori expectation about how income, education and gender would influence the two worldviews, we only treated these variables as additional covariates in our analyses. Results for these models were highly consistent in the direction and magnitude of the effects noted in Table 3. Thus, we report results for these models in Table S4 (Syropoulos et al., 2025S).

Although we were able to clearly distinguish which demographic factors are correlated with changes in dangerous or competitive worldviews through zero-order correlations (see Table 2) it is important to account for the overlap of these factors. Age, race, and political ideology all related to one-another, in a manner that suggests that older, white and conservative individuals experienced greater increases in dangerous worldviews. Thus, to determine whether these associations would consistently explain changes in worldviews across time after adjusting for each other we estimated a hierarchical linear regression model for each worldview. In the first pair of models, the two worldview change scores were regressed on race (1 = person of color, 0 = white), conservative political ideology, and age. In a second and set of models, we included the T1 counterpart of each worldview respectively.

Overall, (conservative) political ideology and age remained significant predictors of changes in BDW, with and without accounting for dangerous worldviews at T1. Race was a significant predictor in the first model, but its association was rendered non-significant after accounting for BDW at T1. In general, participants who were more conservative, older and white reported greater increases in BDW overtime. These demographic indicators explained a small portion of the variance in changes in BDW (6%) whereas the inclusion of the starting scores of BDW explained an additional 20%. Results suggested that those who perceived the world as more dangerous at T1 experienced smaller increases in BDW across the span of one year.

No demographic indicator related to changes in BCW, and together, race, age and political ideology explained only 1% of the variance in the outcome. The inclusion of starting levels of BCW led to 21% of the variance in changes in competitive worldviews to be explained.

Once again, those who perceived the world as more competitive at T1 experienced smaller increases in BCW across the span of one year. Finally, age emerged as a significant predictor of changes in worldviews, but this effect was very small and was not observed when the bivariate association was examined, leading us to consider it unreliable.

Future studies can contribute to the evidence emerging from current investigation in several meaningful ways. First and foremost, future studies could benefit from having measures that have higher reliability. Our two primary outcomes had at best mediocre reliability, however, the fact that a plethora of existing work has used the dangerous and competitive worldview scales (both scales have been used in at least 46 studies as of 2013, with shorter versions also being used; see Perry et al., 2013) lends some support for the use of these measures.⁴4

Crucially, in their meta-analysis of work on BDW and BCW and their association with RWA and SDO, Perry and colleagues (2013, p. 118) highlight that despite differences in the number of items used to capture BDW and BCW, what is expected is a difference in effect size but not the directionality of hypothesized associations (“…Considering the generally high reliability of these dimensions, we expect similar effect sizes regardless of the number of scale items however. Any differences should be in the magnitude rather than direction of effects).

Additional avenues worth exploring include the potential impact of exposure to certain sources of news on perceptions of the world. For example, research has found that media exposure influences people’s attitudes on salient issues during the epidemic, such as COVID-19 vaccination (e.g., Zimand-Sheiner et al., 2021). In addition, extant research has established dangerous and competitive worldviews as antecedents of social right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation (Perry et al., 2013). Dangerous worldviews in particular also predict firearm ownership (Stroebe et al., 2017) and intergroup prejudice (Cook et al., 2018). Competitive worldviews also relate to increased intentions to engage in corrupt behaviors (Vilanova et al., 2022). However little to no evidence exists highlighting how changes in world views relate to change in actual behavior.

Although our large longitudinal dataset provides us with the necessary power to detect small sizes, there should be some caution in interpretation of these findings. The hypotheses we examined here were not pre-registered and were exploratory. The nature of COVID-19 and other events are of course unpredictable, so replicating our findings would be very difficult. Constraints of generality (see Simons et al., 2017 for a discussion) of our results should be acknowledged. We believe our findings – that U.S. residents increased their endorsement of a view of the world as a dangerous place between 2020 and 2021 – can only be used to describe the adult U.S. population during the same period and historical context. We speculate that other times of uncertainty or instability in the U.S. could be opportunities to study worldview change and potentially yield comparable results. Adding to these constraints of generality is the need to understand how diverse cultural and national contexts could produce different worldview changes in response to uncertainty. For instance, it is possible that in more culturally-tight contexts order might be retained, a finding supported by evidence linking cultural tightness with less COVID-attributed deaths (Gelfand et al., 2021), limiting the rise of dangerous worldviews. Conversely, it's possible that increased economic burdens created in certain contexts could exacerbate competitive worldviews.

However, it is hard to predict whether similar unique circumstances afforded to this study during the first year of the COVID pandemic could emerge again. However, other work might bolster our findings which makes use of secondary sources of data, for example by analyzing social media posts from before, during, and after the pandemic. Other researchers have used such methods to understand sentiment in tweets over time (Valdez et al., 2020), and similar datasets or methods could potentially be used to identify whether the content of social media posts might reflect greater fear, authoritarianism, or other correlates of BDW and BCW.

Although we believe that the overall shift in dangerous worldviews could be associated with many kinds of uncertainty experienced throughout the study period (2020-2021; e.g., interest in firearm ownership increased during this period; Syropoulos et al., 2022), we cannot make claims as to which kinds of events contributed to these shifts, nor understand whether there was some specific event which was highly salient among respondents that influenced changes in their worldviews. However, our investigation can and does meaningfully contribute to theoretical arguments about the nature of worldviews, as we provide evidence that periods of uncertainty can indeed reinforce views of the world as dangerous. This premise, the malleability of worldviews, ultimately lends hope to the idea that worldviews can change. Considering their established predictive relationship of prejudicial attitudes, we contend that targeted interventions shaping how we construe the world, or even prolonged exposure to environments that nurture safety and cooperation, could prove beneficial in sustaining more prosocial construction of the world and ultimately even help reduce prejudice.

The Coronavirus pandemic was a time of great uncertainty, uprooting previous conventions of normality in people’s lives. During the first year of the pandemic, we tracked people’s perceptions of the world. We found that for nearly 50% of our sample the world appeared to be more dangerous or competitive than before. The changes for dangerous worldviews were especially prominent for those sensitive to threat (i.e., people who were older, white and politically conservative). Further, for both worldviews, these increases were more prominent for those who did not see the world as highly dangerous or competitive at T1. Since these worldviews are established antecedents of prejudice and intergroup hostility, it is important to understand how they shift over time and due to changes in the societal context. The current investigation adds to such efforts, by illustrating that during times of high uncertainty and disorder, these views of the world do in fact change, suggesting that worldviews are potentially more malleable than previously thought.