How racial animus forms and spreads: Evidence from the coronavirus pandemic

Lu, Runjing; Sheng, Sophie Yanying

doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2022.05.014

Cited by 12 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Anecdotal evidence tells of helpful neighbors who go shopping for the vulnerable, donate food, or sew homemade face coverings for nursing homes. 1 Other individuals have been less benevolent: Some have even gone as far as engaging in racist attacks on members of ethnic groups who have been blamed for spreading the disease (Devakumar et al, 2020;Lu and Sheng, 2021). Moreover, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, attention has shifted away from once-prominent concerns, including the refugee situation and famine in developing countries.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 and pro-sociality: How do donors respond to local pandemic severity, increased salience, and media coverage?

Adena

Harke

2022

Exp Econ

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Has the COVID-19 pandemic affected pro-sociality among individuals? After the onset of the pandemic, many charitable appeals were updated to include a reference to COVID-19. Did donors increase their giving in response to such changes? In order to answer these questions, we conducted a real-donation online experiment with more than 4200 participants from 149 local areas in England and over 21 weeks. First, we varied the fundraising appeal to either include or exclude a reference to COVID-19. We found that including the reference to COVID-19 in the appeal increased donations. Second, in a natural experiment-like approach, we studied how the relative local severity of the pandemic and media coverage about local COVID-19 severity affected giving in our experiment. We found that both higher local severity and more related articles increased giving of participants in the respective areas. This holds for different specifications, including specifications with location fixed effects, time fixed effects, a broad set of individual characteristics to account for a potentially changing composition of the sample over time and to account for health- and work-related experiences with and expectations regarding the pandemic. While negative experiences with COVID-19 correlate negatively with giving, both approaches led us to conclude that the pure effect of increased salience of the pandemic on pro-sociality is positive. Despite the shift in public attention toward the domestic fight against the pandemic and away from developing countries’ challenges, we found that preferences did not shift toward giving more to a national project and less to developing countries.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 and pro-sociality: How do donors respond to local pandemic severity, increased salience, and media coverage?

Adena

Harke

2022

Exp Econ

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“…Importantly, we would expect objective and perceived vulnerability to be correlated. In addition, prior work finds that responses to COVID-19 are associated with indicators of objective vulnerability, like county-level infection and death rates (Ruisch et al 2021) and the timing of the first community COVID-19 diagnosis (Lu and Sheng 2022). We acknowledge, however, that our primary vulnerability measures serve as an imperfect test of BIS, and we return to this issue in the discussion.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Individuals—and perhaps especially those who were attentive to rhetoric from right-wing elites—may have fused anxiety about COVID-19 with prejudice toward people of Asian, and especially Chinese, origin, “a stigmatized group framed as responsible for the disease” (Reny and Barreto 2020: p. 2). Supporting this account, Lu and Sheng (2022) find that each additional tweet related to China and COVID-19 from Donald Trump in one hour predicted a 20% increase in tweets that used a slur for Chinese people in the following four hours (also see Pei and Mehta 2020). In addition, each such tweet from Donald Trump predicted an 8% increase in hate incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate the following day.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Politics, not Vulnerability: Republicans Discriminated against Chinese-born Americans throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abascal

Makovi

Yao

2023

J. Race Ethnicity Politics

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Asian Americans became targets of increasingly hostile behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. What motivated this? Fears of contagion arising from a behavioral immune system may have motivated hostility toward Asian Americans, especially among those Americans vulnerable to COVID-19. Additionally, stigmatizing rhetoric from right-wing figures may have legitimated anti-Asian behavior among those Americans who held stronger anti-Asian sentiments to begin with or who were more receptive to right-wing rhetoric. We explore these possibilities using a behavioral game with a representative sample of Americans at two points: in May and October 2020. Participants were partnered with a U.S.- or Chinese-born American in a give-or-take dictator game. The average American discriminated against Chinese-born Americans in May but not October 2020, when China was no longer a COVID-19 hotspot. But among Republicans, who may have held stronger anti-Asian sentiments to begin with and who were likely more receptive to right-wing rhetoric, discrimination—that is, differential treatment—was both stronger in May compared to non-Republicans and persisted into October 2020. Notably, Americans who were more vulnerable to COVID-19 were not especially likely to discriminate.

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“…In the context of epidemics, Jedwab et al (2019) find that the Black Death of the 1350s triggered anti-Jewish persecutions in towns where people were more inclined to believe antisemitic allegations but not in towns where the activities of Jewish inhabitants were complementary to the local economy. Bartoš et al (2021), Dipoppa et al (2021), and Lu and Sheng (2022 show, either experimentally or by using a difference-in-difference strategy, that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has increased discrimination against the Chinese minority in the Czech Republic, Italy, and the United States, respectively.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Spatial Drivers of Discrimination: Evidence From Anti-Muslim Fake News in India

et al. 2023

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How racial animus forms and spreads: Evidence from the coronavirus pandemic

Cited by 12 publications

References 27 publications

COVID-19 and pro-sociality: How do donors respond to local pandemic severity, increased salience, and media coverage?

COVID-19 and pro-sociality: How do donors respond to local pandemic severity, increased salience, and media coverage?

Politics, not Vulnerability: Republicans Discriminated against Chinese-born Americans throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Spatial Drivers of Discrimination: Evidence From Anti-Muslim Fake News in India

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