Deservingness at the Frontline: How Health-Related Responsibility Cues Affect Sanctioning and Prioritization of Citizens

Deservingness literature has shown that people, including frontline workers, spontaneously judge whether welfare recipients are responsible for their own situation or are victims of circumstances beyond their own control, and that these judgments shape behaviors and opinions. We contribute to this literature by examining the impact of clients' responsibility for their own sickness on how the clients are treated by frontline workers. Using a pre-registered vignette survey experiment among 1050 caseworkers, we examine our hypothesis that frontline workers treat clients who are responsible for their own sickness more harshly. In the experiment, we manipulate whether a client got COVID-19 because of his own behavior or was unlucky to catch it. We find that although the manipulation strongly influences frontline workers' responsibility attribution, it does not affect inclinations to help or sanction the client. Our findings highlight that factors other than deservingness are important for frontline workers' prioritization of sick citizens.