Because many on the political right see the lockdowns as impinging “on their liberty, the free market’s workings, and their financial well-being,” he continued, “many conservatives want the lockdowns ended as quickly as possible.”

In addition, Wilcox noted, “some (especially male) conservatives see the lockdowns and mask wearing as expressions of cowardice that they reject as unmanly.”

This last point touches on “the white male effect,” a theme that regularly emerges in studies of risk taking and risk aversion.

In their 2012 paper “Bringing ideology in: the conservative white male effect on worry about environmental problems in the USA,” Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap found that conservative white men

“express significantly less personal worry about the quality of the environment and about eight environmental problems than do other adults in the general public, even controlling for the effects of several relevant social, demographic, political, and temporal variables.”