When fear crashes with anger: Attitudes toward various forms of pandemic regulations in time of civil protests

Since the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, many countries were torn between at least two emotions. One of them was health-, as well as future- and overall situation-related fear. The second was anger – mostly an anti-establishment and anti-governmental one. In this reality, various pandemic restrictions and regulations were imposed on citizens. This specific mix of naturally evoked emotions created an opportunity to check how they affect attitudes toward various forms of restrictive policy proposals, and how they interact in shaping these attitudes. We present the results of two studies (total N = 528, one preregistered) conducted in Poland. The first study was conducted in autumn 2020, when abortion law related civil protests erupted on the eve of the second wave of pandemic. In this study, we induced and measured both sociopolitical situation related fear and anti-governmental anger. The second study was conducted in summer 2022, when other objects of fear and anger appeared (Russian aggression on Ukraine or visible signs of climate crisis). In both of these studies, we have looked at what fear and anger (focused on diverse objects) can add to the basic level of proposed policies acceptance or rejection. Fear increased acceptance of the proposed regulations, both those generally accepted, as those generally rejected. The impact of anger was not simply negative and opposite to the impact of fear. Rather, anger accentuated the basic evaluation of each proposition – it lowered attitudes toward the rejected ones, increased attitudes toward the accepted ones, and left untouched attitudes toward neutrally evaluated ones.