Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, political ideology has been perhaps the strongest predictor of consumers' perceptions of the coronavirus's threat. This article demonstrates that differences between conservatives' and liberals' responses to COVID-19 are mitigated when people perceive the virus itself to have agency. We propose that conservatives are generally more sensitive to threats that are relatively high (vs. low) in agency. Consequently, we find that greater perceived agency of the coronavirus increases its perceived threat among conservatives but not liberals, and that this interaction is driven by differences in the tendency to attribute responsibility to agential entities. We also explore the effect of these malleable threat perceptions on downstream consequences related to the pandemic, including planned in-person consumption frequency. This research offers public health officials, policymakers, and firms insight into how to communicate more effectively about the pandemic, and contributes theoretically to the literature on political ideology and threat sensitivity.

Prior research suggests that the influence of marketing cues on consumers’ behavior can occur as a result of either system 1 processes (i.e., associative, intuitive, impulsive processes) or system 2 processes (i.e., rule‐based, analytic, reflective processes). We demonstrate that how people express a behavior can influence whether the behavior reflects predominantly system 1 or system 2 processing. Specifically, we propose a process—mode of expression congruence effect, whereby less deliberate behaviors (e.g., physically grabbing something) are relatively more sensitive to system 1 processing, while more deliberate behaviors (e.g., writing down one’s preference) are relatively more sensitive to system 2 processing. Six studies provide support for process—mode of expression congruence, showing that the magnitude and direction in which an environmental cue influences a consumer’s behavior can depend on the deliberateness of the mode of expression.