How fear and collectivism influence public's preventive intention towards COVID-19 infection: A study based on big data from the social media

Abstract

Background: Despite worldwide calls for precautionary measures to combat COVID-19, the public's preventive intention still varies significantly among different regions. Exploring the influencing factors of the public's preventive intention is very important to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Previous studies have found that fear can effectively improve the public's preventive intention, but they ignore the impact of differences in cultural values. The present study examines the combined effect of fear and collectivism on the public's preventive intention towards COVID-19 through the analysis of social media big data.Methods: The Sina microblog posts of 108,914 active users from Chinese mainland 31 provinces were downloaded. The data was retrieved from January 11 to February 21 2020. Afterwards, we conducted a province-level analysis of the contents of downloaded posts. Three lexicons were applied to automatically recognise the scores of fear, collectivism, and preventive intention of 31 provinces. After that, a multiple regression model was established to examine the combined effect of fear and collectivism on the public's preventive intention towards COVID-19. The simple slope test and the Johnson-Neyman technique were used to test the interaction of fear and collectivism on preventive intention.Results: The study reveals that: (a) both fear and collectivism can positively predict people's preventive intention and (b) there is an interaction of fear and collectivism on people's preventive intention, where fear and collectivism reduce each other's positive influence on people's preventive intention.Conclusion: The promotion of fear on people's preventive intention may be limited and conditional, and values of collectivism can well compensate for the promotion of fear on preventive intention. These results provide scientific inspiration on how to enhance the public's preventive intention towards COVID-19 effectively.

Impact of Societal Culture on Covid-19 Morbidity and Mortality across Countries

“…Using the cultural groupings of countries based on the World Values Survey (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005), Mayer et al (2020) find that countries in two cultural families-Confucian and South Asian-seem particularly successful in containing Covid-19 morbidity rates. In a country-specific study, Huang (2020) find that collectivism and fear of Covid-19 together perhaps drive people's preventive intentions in China. Other studies too have highlighted the seemingly deleterious role of individualism within US (Bazzi et al, 2021) as well as across countries (Maaravi et al, 2021;Webster et al, 2021).…”

“It’s a war! It’s a battle! It’s a fight!”: Do militaristic metaphors increase people's threat perceptions and support for COVID-19 policies?

“…Research on long-term attitudes and behaviours has frequently shown that personality variables, such as different traits, personal values or convictions often explain substantial variance in the prediction of health-related behaviours (Cockerham et al, 2006;Raynor & Levine, 2009;Vollrath & Torgersen, 2008). With regard to emotional and behavioural responses to COVID-19, risk aversion (Nikolov et al, 2020), trust in politicians and in science (Lalot et al, in press;Kreps & Kriner, 2020) as well as collectivism (Huang et al, 2020;Pei et al, 2020) have been identified as relevant predictors. To be able to disentangle potential framing effects from possibly confounding variables, we integrated these variables as personality-related covariates.…”

Balancing the Freedom–Security Trade-Off During Crises and Disasters

“…Especially when increased security becomes socially normative, acting in line with group norms and for the safety of others may not feel like losing freedom to the same extent as it would to people in a more individualistic cultural context. Consistent with this possibility, some initial evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that higher levels of collectivism were related to greater support of restrictive policies (Pei et al, 2020), greater compliance with mask and social-distancing mandates (Bazzi et al, 2021; Huang et al, 2020; Lu et al, 2021), lower rates of mental-health distress (Germani et al, 2020; but see also Kowal et al, 2020), and lower rates of virus transmission and death (Pei et al, 2020).…”