Is COVID-19 Increasing Racially Motivated Crimes?

There has been a string of racially motivated crimes in recent months.

Could one of the side-effects of COVID-19 be an increase in racism?

In a very compelling study, Letendre and colleagues showed that disease threat (the increased prevalence of parasites and pathogens) was related to xenophobic and ethnocentric ideals, and those ideals translated into increased violence against out-group members. Importantly, one need not contract a disease to show the changes in ideals or behavior.

Last year, a study by Harvard researcher Brian O’Shea and colleagues showed that individuals who live in U.S. states with higher disease rates exhibit greater unconscious and conscious racial prejudice and are more likely to endorse racist ideology.

Just as our physical immune system gets “fired up” when exposed to disease, humans and other animals have evolved a behavioral immune system that triggers anti-outgroup sentiments when disease threat is high.

The most common example of the behavioral immune system is the increase in feelings of disgust when disease pressure is high (Weinstein et al., 2018). We might be less likely to eat novel foods and avoid people who look like they could be infectious.

While the behavioral immune system in no way excuses prejudiced ideology or behavior, the knowledge of this phenomenon might help people question and reject any ethnocentric or anti- outgroup feelings that they might be having.

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About the Author: DrStefanieKJohnson

Dr. Stefanie K. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Management at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder. She holds a Ph.D. from Rice University and is particularly interested in the effects of unconscious biases in the evaluation of women and minorities, with the goal of finding ways to mitigate those biases. Dr. Johnson brings bias to light with an engaging and humorous approach to advanced scientific research, which has earned her numerous accolades and invitations to present her work at meetings around the world, including the White House for a 2016 summit on diversity in corporate America on National Equal Pay Day, and the 2016 Harvard Negotiation and Leadership Conference. She has published over 70 journal articles and book chapters in outlets such as Harvard Business Review, Journal of Applied Psychology and The Academy of Management Journal. She has extensive consulting experience and has created and delivered leadership-development training with an emphasis on evidence-based practice. In recognition of her unique research, Dr. Johnson has been awarded nearly three million dollars in external funding to study leadership and create leadership development programs aimed at increasing safety. Media outlets featuring her work include: The Economist, Newsweek, Time, and CNN. Stefanie lives in the Boulder Bubble in Colorado with her Biology Professor husband, two young kiddos, and two old kitties.