“People are willing, when they are anxious, to make this trade off of taking rights away from other people in order to keep the population safe,” Gadarian explains. “And that's a trade off that you would continue to have in other policy areas. Terrorism is a very clear example of that. We think of anxiety as a tool. It's not normatively good or bad. It can be used for various purposes. And this is one of them where we want to think about when anxiety is very high about immigration or public health. Whose rights are we willing to take away and who pays the consequences of that in a democracy?”

“Because there's some evolutionary benefit in groups, I think one of the ways that politicians are quite effective at making people fearful is to make them fearful of groups that are different than themselves,” says Gadarian. “And sometimes that's ethnic groups or language groups. Sometimes that's, we think about the discussion going on in the U.S. about trans rights right now, kind of minority groups, sexual minorities. I don't think we're advocating for that, but that is one thing that we have seen that is quite effective,” she says.