*2.1. Participants*

We recruited adult Chinese residents who were told this was a study on public social perceptions via Credamo (a Chinese questionnaire website, www.credamo.com (accessed on 10 January 2022). To thank them for their time, each participant who provided a valid response received ¥5. All participants were fully informed that their anonymity was assured, why the research was being conducted, and how their data would be used. As we aimed to test the effect of individuals' social class, only non-student participants' data were included. We included two questions to identify whether each participant's

data were valid, namely, "Please choose 'strongly disagree' for this question," and "Please choose 'not sure' for this question," which confirmed whether the participants had read the questions carefully. Data from participants who failed to answer these questions correctly were deleted. Students (according to the participants' self-reported occupations) and participants who did not know the pandemic risk level in their area (according to the comparison between their self-reported risk level and the official risk level of the area where they lived) were also excluded (see also Section 2.2.5). In total, 92 participants with invalid data were excluded, leaving a final sample of 837 (43.8% male, *N* = 367, *M*age = 31.93, *SD* = 6.82), which was higher than the recommended sample size (*N* ≈ 250) for obtaining stable coefficients based on the average effect size (r ≈ 0.20) in social and personality psychology [36,37].
