Partisanship and Fear are Associated with Resistance to COVID-19 Directives

Mike Lindow, David DeFranza, Arul Mishra, Himanshu Mishra


Abstract
Ideological differences have had a large impact on individual and community response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Early behavioral research during the pandemic showed that conservatives were less likely to adhere to health directives, which contradicts a body of work suggesting that conservative ideology emphasizes a rule abiding, loss aversion, and prevention focus. We reconcile this contradiction by analyzing semantic content of local press releases, federal press releases, and localized tweets during the first month of the government response to COVID-19 in the United States. Controlling for factors such as COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths, local economic indicators, and more, we find that online expressions of fear in conservative areas lead to an increase in adherence to public health recommendations concerning COVID-19, and that expressions of fear in government press releases are a significant predictor of expressed fear on Twitter.
Anthology ID:
2021.wassa-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Orphee De Clercq, Alexandra Balahur, Joao Sedoc, Valentin Barriere, Shabnam Tafreshi, Sven Buechel, Veronique Hoste
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
25–33
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wassa-1.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mike Lindow, David DeFranza, Arul Mishra, and Himanshu Mishra. 2021. Partisanship and Fear are Associated with Resistance to COVID-19 Directives. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 25–33, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Partisanship and Fear are Associated with Resistance to COVID-19 Directives (Lindow et al., WASSA 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wassa-1.3.pdf