Collective Sense-Making in Times of Crisis: Connecting Terror Management Theory with Twitter Reactions to the Berlin Terrorist Attack

Abstract

Recent terrorist attacks have increased the need to examine the public’s response to such threats. This study focuses on the content of Twitter messages related to the 2016 terrorist attack on the Berlin Christmas market. We complement the collective sense-making perspective with the terror management theory (TMT) perspective to understand why people used Twitter in the aftermath of the attack. We use structural topic modeling to analyze our dataset of 51,000 tweets. Our results indicate that people used Twitter to make sense of the events and as part of typical reactions in TMT, that is, to validate their own worldviews and maintain their self-esteem. In accordance with TMT, we found that people used Twitter to search for meaning and value, show sympathy for victims and their families, or call for tolerance, but also to express nationalistic sentiment and greater hostility toward values and views other than their own. We further show that topics varied over the course of the attack and in the days that followed. Whereas in the first two days there were many emotion-related tweets and operational updates, subsequent days saw more opinion-related tweets. Our findings contribute to the literature on collective behavior in the aftermath of terrorist attacks.

Weaving the hashtag into the fabric of legality

“…109 These studies demonstrate that the use of Twitter, and the hashtag affordance, allows individuals to connect with others in order to make sense of horrific events. 110 However within the discipline of law, scholarship surrounding social media and terrorism is largely dedicated to the furtherance of counter-terrorism policies and related socio-political strategies. Krutrök and Lindgren argue that terrorism studies have tended to focus on the political causes and the perpetrators of terrorism, or the role of social media as 'potential tools for terrorist recruitment, mobilization, and coordination', rather than to the narratives produced during these moments.…”

Anxiety buffers and the threat of extreme automation: a terror management theory perspective

“…However, one threat that is unavoidable for all humans has been investigated extensively: death. The TMT was developed in the social-psychology literature and has recently been cited in the information systems literature in studies of virtual reality (Chittaro, 2017) and social media (Kaakinen, 2018;Fischer-Preßler, 2019). The TMT suggests that people's awareness of death creates the potential for intense primal fear, which is referred to by the term "terror" (Pyszczynski et al, 2015).…”

Advancing Conflict Research Through Computational Approaches

“…Conflict research benefits from these methods by identifying the relation between particular actors and indicators of violence in textual data, thus supporting the analysis of, e.g., online hate speech campaigns, cyber mobbing, and social media flame wars. Examples include analyses of collective sense-making after terrorist attacks based on Twitter comments (Fischer-Preßler et al, 2019) and verbal discrimination against African Americans in the media based on online newspaper articles (Leschke and Schwemmer, 2019). Further details and a survey on the use of these methods in conflict research are available in the chapter "Text as Data for Conflict Research" of this book.…”