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Public sentiment toward the COVID-19 vaccine as expressed on social media can interfere with communication by public health agencies on the importance of getting vaccinated. We investigated Twitter data to understand differences in sentiment, moral values, and language use between political ideologies on the COVID-19 vaccine. We estimated political ideology, conducted a sentiment analysis, and guided by the tenets of moral foundations theory (MFT), we analyzed 262,267 English language tweets from the United States containing COVID-19 vaccine-related keywords between May 2020 and October 2021. We applied the Moral Foundations Dictionary and used topic modeling and Word2Vec to understand moral values and the context of words central to the discussion of the vaccine debate. A quadratic trend showed that extreme ideologies of both Liberals and Conservatives expressed a higher negative sentiment than Moderates, with Conservatives expressing more negative sentiment than Liberals. Compared to Conservative tweets, we found the expression of Liberal tweets to be rooted in a wider set of moral values, associated with moral foundations of care (getting the vaccine for protection), fairness (having access to the vaccine), liberty (related to the vaccine mandate), and authority (trusting the vaccine mandate imposed by the government). Conservative tweets were found to be associated with harm (around safety of the vaccine) and oppression (around the government mandate). Furthermore, political ideology was associated with the expression of different meanings for the same words, e.g. “science” and “death.” Our results inform public health outreach communication strategies to best tailor vaccine information to different groups.
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Why we should care about moral foundations when preparing for the next pandemic: Insights from Canada, the UK and the US
Health behaviors that do not effectively prevent disease can negatively impact psychological wellbeing and potentially drain motivations to engage in more effective behavior, potentially creating higher health risk. Despite this, studies linking “moral foundations” (i.e., concerns about harm, fairness, purity, authority, ingroup, and/or liberty) to health behaviors have generally been limited to a narrow range of behaviors, specifically effective ones. We therefore explored the degree to which moral foundations predicted a wider range of not only effective but ineffective (overreactive) preventative behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 1, participants from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States reported their engagement in these preventative behaviors and completed a COVID-specific adaptation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire during the pandemic peak. While differences occurred across countries, authority considerations consistently predicted increased engagement in both effective preventative behaviors but also ineffective overreactions, even when controlling for political ideology. By contrast, purity and liberty considerations reduced intentions to engage in effective behaviors like vaccination but had no effect on ineffective behaviors. Study 2 revealed that the influence of moral foundations on U.S participants’ behavior remained stable 5-months later, after the pandemic peak. These findings demonstrate that the impact of moral foundations on preventative behaviors is similar across a range of western democracies, and that recommendations by authorities can have unexpected consequences in terms of promoting ineffective—and potentially damaging—overreactive behaviors. The findings underscore the importance of moral concerns for the design of health interventions that selectively promote effective preventative behavior.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2028140
- PAR ID:
- 10432408
- Editor(s):
- Huynh, Luu Duc
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PLOS ONE
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 1932-6203
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- e0285549
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract In early March 2020, two crises emerged: the COVID-19 public health crisis and a corresponding economic crisis resulting from business closures and skyrocketing job losses. While the link between socioeconomic status and infectious disease is well-documented, the psychological relationships among economic considerations, such as financial constraint and economic anxiety, and health considerations, such as perceptions of disease spread and preventative actions, is not well understood. Despite past research illustrating the strong link between financial fragility and a wide range of behaviors, surprisingly little research has examined the psychological relationship between the economic crisis and beliefs and behaviors related to the co-occurring health crisis. We show that financial constraint predicts people’s beliefs about both their personal risk of infection and the national spread of the virus as well as their social distancing behavior. In addition, we compare the predictive utility of financial constraint to two other commonly studied factors: political partisanship and local disease severity. We also show that negative affect partially mediates the relationship between financial constraint and COVID-19 beliefs and social distancing behaviors. These results suggest the economic crisis created by COVID-19 spilled over into people’s beliefs about the health crisis and their behaviors.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285549
