Anger contributes to the spread of COVID-19 misinformation

Han, Jiyoung; Cha, Meeyoung; Lee, Won–Jae

doi:10.37016/mr-2020-39

Cited by 57 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Anxiety has been found to increase information seeking (Valentino et al, 2008). Anger has been shown to increase susceptibility to misinformation (Greenstein & Franklin, 2020;Han et al, 2020). Counter to these studies, we do not find robust results for anger and fear.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 81%

Happiness and surprise are associated with worse truth discernment of COVID-19 headlines among social media users in Nigeria

et al. 2021

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Do emotions we experience after reading headlines help us discern true from false information or cloud our judgement? Understanding whether emotions are associated with distinguishing truth from fiction and sharing information has implications for interventions designed to curb the spread of misinformation. Among 1,341 Facebook users in Nigeria, we find that emotions—specifically happiness and surprise—are associated with greater belief in and sharing of false, relative to true, COVID-19 headlines. Respondents who are older are more reflective, and do not support the ruling party are better at discerning true from false COVID-19 information.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 81%

Happiness and surprise are associated with worse truth discernment of COVID-19 headlines among social media users in Nigeria

et al. 2021

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“…We therefore expect public health emergencies such as the current COVID-19 pandemic to lead to a larger variety of emotional expressions in tweets since related misinformation is shared out of altruistic reasons to some extent, for example regarding potential preventions. However, Han et al (2020) also find that anger-as an emotion with negative valence-leads people to believe in and to spread misinformation related to COVID-19.…”

Section: The Role Of Emotions For Misinformationmentioning

confidence: 87%

Different types of COVID-19 misinformation have different emotional valence on Twitter

et al. 2021

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The spreading of COVID-19 misinformation on social media could have severe consequences on people's behavior. In this paper, we investigated the emotional expression of misinformation related to the COVID-19 crisis on Twitter and whether emotional valence differed depending on the type of misinformation. We collected 17,463,220 English tweets with 76 COVID-19-related hashtags for March 2020. Using Google Fact Check Explorer API we identified 226 unique COVID-19 false stories for March 2020. These were clustered into six types of misinformation (cures, virus, vaccine, politics, conspiracy theories, and other). Applying the 226 classifiers to the Twitter sample we identified 690,004 tweets. Instead of running the sentiment on all tweets we manually coded a random subset of 100 tweets for each classifier to increase the validity, reducing the dataset to 2,097 tweets. We found that only a minor part of the entire dataset was related to misinformation. Also, misinformation in general does not lean towards a certain emotional valence. However, looking at comparisons of emotional valence for different types of misinformation uncovered that misinformation related to “virus” and “conspiracy” had a more negative valence than “cures,” “vaccine,” “politics,” and “other.” Knowing from existing studies that negative misinformation spreads faster, this demonstrates that filtering for misinformation type is fruitful and indicates that a focus on “virus” and “conspiracy” could be one strategy in combating misinformation. As emotional contexts affect misinformation spreading, the knowledge about emotional valence for different types of misinformation will help to better understand the spreading and consequences of misinformation.

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“…First, anger tends to provoke a strong desire to take action (Valentino et al 2011). Second, anger has been shown to make individuals even more susceptible to misinformation (Greenstein and Franklin 2020; Han et al 2020), thereby strengthening one's beliefs in a conspiracy. For instance, when faced with a "stolen" election, we would expect a person with high internal political efficacy to feel anger, making them more likely to support people taking extreme actions.…”

Section: Efficacymentioning

confidence: 99%

What I Saw on the Road to Insurrection: Internal Political Efficacy, Conspiracy Beliefs and the Effect of Depression on Support for the January 6th Storming of the Capitol

Baum¹,

Druckman²,

Simonson³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Depression can affect individuals’ attitudes by enhancing cognitive biases and altering perceptions of risk. Some evidence suggests an association between depression and endorsing mass violence. This linkage, however, is undertheorized by social science, tentatively empirically supported, with little attention to conditions impacting the relationship. We investigate whether and how mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic influenced Americans’ attitudes regarding domestic extremist violence surrounding the 2020 election and the January 6th US Capitol riot. We develop a theory regarding the circumstances under which depression will be positively associated with supporting extremist violence. We posit that it depends on internal political efficacy, conspiracy beliefs, and their combination. We test our theory using a two-wave national survey, from November 2020, and January 2021. We find that among efficacious individuals holding conspiracy beliefs, depression is positively associated with support for the Capitol stormers and for violence in response if the respondent believed the election was decided unfairly.

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Anger contributes to the spread of COVID-19 misinformation

Cited by 57 publications

References 29 publications

Happiness and surprise are associated with worse truth discernment of COVID-19 headlines among social media users in Nigeria

Happiness and surprise are associated with worse truth discernment of COVID-19 headlines among social media users in Nigeria

Different types of COVID-19 misinformation have different emotional valence on Twitter

What I Saw on the Road to Insurrection: Internal Political Efficacy, Conspiracy Beliefs and the Effect of Depression on Support for the January 6th Storming of the Capitol

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