How Social Media Influences Public Attitudes to COVID-19 Governance Policy: An Analysis Based on Cognitive-Affective Model

Abstract

Introduction

Based on the cognitive-affective model, this paper examines how social media affects the public cognitive and affective factors, further influence their attitudes towards COVID-19 governance policy.

Methods

Through an online survey, we measured individual COVID-19 policy attitude, social media use and other related factors of 1222 respondents from 12 countries, and based on this, we carried out regression and mediation analysis on the data to obtain the research results.

Results

From the perspective of cognitive factors, the public perception of the severity of the COVID-19 itself does not significantly affect their attitudes towards governance policy. On the contrary, the evaluation on government governance performance, risks and governance anticipations have more significant impacts. Among the affective factors, personal anxiety and patriotism significantly affect the formation of public attitudes, personal anxiety is positively correlated, and patriotism is negatively correlated. It is important to note that nationalism has no significant influence on public attitudes to COVID-19 policy on a global scale.

Conclusion

(1) Social media influences the public COVID-19 policy attitudes through their moderating effect on affective and cognitive factors. (2) The impact of social media on affective pathways is more significant than that on cognitive pathways. (3) The positive moderating effect of social media on patriotism obscures the tendency of strict governance of COVID-19 caused by aggravating people’s anxiety.

Keywords:

• Covid-19
• public attitude
• social media
• cognition
• affection
• patriotism

Ethics Statement

Hereby, the authors of this paper; Ruixia Han; Jian Xu, do consciously assure that this study has followed the guidelines and principles as set forth by the following ethical statement:

1. The body of work comprising this paper is entirely original and none of it has been previously published.

2. Informed consent was obtained from all participants in this study prior to their participation.

3. This study’s research methodology, the data collected, and findings were all conducted without anything being falsified or purposefully altered.

4. This study was reviewed and verified an ethics committee under the governing institution of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Ethics Committee: The Academic Committee of the School of Media & Communications.

Ethics Committee Members: Benqian Li; Guoliang Zhang; Jinwen Xie; Yan Ge.

1. This study was conducted under the principles set forth by the most recent Declaration of Helsinki ethical standards and the World Medical Association to ensure the safety, well-being, and overall benefit of all study participants.

2. We the authors agree and abide with the above statements.

Author Contributions

Both authors made a significant contribution to the work reported, whether that is in the conception, study design, execution, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation, or in all these areas; took part in drafting, revising or critically reviewing the article; gave final approval of the version to be published; have agreed on the journal to which the article has been submitted; and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in relation to this work.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the National Social Science Fund of China (grant number: 21BXW053).