“Pandemic stress made him do it!”: COVID-19-related threat predicts vicarious justification for assaulting Chinese men—especially those with strong ethnic identity

The Justification-Suppression Model posits that people are motivated to justify their prejudice-driven treatment of others with a nonprejudiced cause. Notably, individuals have utilized COVID-19-related stress to justify their assaults on Chinese people. We examined factors that might predict people employing similar pandemic-related stress attributions to justify another person's assault of a Chinese individual which could, in turn, predict diminished support for punishing the perpetrator. Specifically, we explored the role of pathogenic threat given its well-documented tendency to elevate outgroup-directed prejudice. Participants reported their feelings of COVID-19-related threat and read about a COVID-19-related assault. They then reported the extent they believed the perpetrator committed the assault due to COVID-19-related stress (viz., pandemic stress attributions) and their support for perpetrator-directed legal sanctions. In Study 1, we varied victim ethnicity (i.e., Chinese, White). In Study 2, we varied the degree of ethnic identification (i.e., strong, weak) for the Chinese victim. In Study 1, higher COVID-19-related threat predicted greater pandemic stress attributions when the victim was Chinese (but not White). For Study 2, higher COVID-19-related threat predicted greater pandemic stress attributions for victims strongly (but not weakly) identified with their Chinese ethnicity. Across both studies, heightened pandemic stress attributions predicted reduced support for legal sanctions. Pathogenic threat was linked to motivated processes (i.e., pandemic stress attributions) that predicted diminished societal support for punishing those who assaulted Chinese people. This pattern of findings did not occur when the victim showed weak ethnic identification.