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Abstract: In early March 2020, two crises emerged: the COVID-19 public health crisis and a corresponding economic crisis resulting from business closures and skyrocketing job losses. While the link between socioeconomic status and infectious disease is well-documented, the psychological relationship among economic considerations, such as financial constraint and economic anxiety, and health considerations, such as perceptions of disease spread and preventative actions, is not well understood. Despite past research illustrating the strong link between financial fragility and a wide range of behaviors, surprisingly little research is examining the psychological relationship between the economic crisis and beliefs and behaviors related to the co-occurring health crisis. We show that financial constraint predicts people’s beliefs about both their personal risk of infection and the national spread of the virus as well as their social distancing behavior. In addition, we compare the predictive utility of financial constraint to two other commonly studied factors: political partisanship and local disease severity. The strength of the effect of financial constraint equals or eclipses the influence of partisanship on beliefs and is much larger than that of local disease severity. We also show that negative affect partially mediates the relationship between financial constraint and COVID-19 beliefs and social distancing behaviors. These results suggest the economic crisis created by COVID-19 is spilling over into people’s beliefs about the health crisis and their behaviors. We call upon psychologists to further investigate important connections across these co-occurring economic and health crises
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