Tag Archives: fear

The Changing Demographics of COVID-19

Health, Politics, , ,

The media have given us a stereotype of the Americans most likely to have contracted the coronavirus. You probably think of COVID-19 as a disease primarily affecting the country’s urban poor. You have probably also read the news that African-Americans, and possibly Latinos, have been stricken at a rate higher than their percentage of the population. These generalizations are accurate, but things are changing.

In a brief paper, Dr. William Frey of the Brookings Institution analyzed date compiled by the New York Times in order to compare the demographic characteristics of those counties hardest hit by the virus at different points in time.

In the above chart, the second bar from the left shows the characteristics of those counties with an infection rate of 100 or more per 100,000 population as of March 29. The bar at the left shows the population baselines. As you can see, the hardest hit counties were more likely to be in the Northeast, more urban, and more likely to have voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

The next three bars show the characteristics of the new counties that reached the 100/100,000 rate during each of the next three weeks. These counties are increasingly located in the West, South and Midwest, they are more suburban and rural, and they are more likely than the early counties to have voted for Trump. In other words, the counties that are most affected by the coronavirus are gradually coming to resemble the demographics of the country as a whole.

This table shows a similar picture. Majority-white counties are catching up with counties with more minorities. The newly-affected counties are less likely to have a large immigrant population. The income data, however, are less consistent with the media stereotype, since the early counties contain more higher income people. I assume this is because the virus first took hold in cities with high income inequality like New York and Seattle. Over time, however, the income distribution is starting to resemble the baseline for the country.

These demographic shifts seem likely to have political implications. At the very least, white rural Republicans are not going to be able to dismiss the pandemic as somebody else’s problem. Frey suggests that they will become less receptive to Trump’s attempts to reopen American businesses. Fear of mortality will spread. In the past, such external threats have tended to help conservative candidates, but the situation is far too volatile to make a one-sided prediction. Will some people who voted for Trump in 2016 blame him for not keeping the danger away from their community?

You may also be interested in reading:

Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections (Revisited)?

Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections (Revisited)?

Media, Politics, Social psychology, , , ,

Social psychologists have known for a long time that (a) politically conservative people are more responsive to fear-arousing threats, such as news about terrorism or weather emergencies, and that (b) reminding them of these threats causes people to become more conservative in their attitudes. Due to COVID-19, this is a time when we are all confronting our own mortality. (How many of you, in the last six weeks, have thought about the current status of your will?) This raises the question of what effect the coronavirus will have on the 2020 elections.

This week the Association for Psychological Science reprinted a 2016 research study by Alec Beall and colleagues entitled “Infections and Elections: Did an Ebola Outbreak Influence the 2014 U. S. Federal Elections (And If So How)?” Unfortunately, the study is gated, so only members can read it, but I wrote a blog post about it on December 31, 2016, shortly after its publication. Here is that post. After you’ve read it, I’ll return with some comments (also in italics).

 

Republicans did very well on Election Day 2014, gaining control of the Senate for the first time in eight years and increasing their majority in the House of Representatives. Most pundits attributed these results to low turnout by Democrats in a non-presidential election year and to President Obama’s poor approval ratings, due primarily to the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act earlier that year. But a recent paper by Alec Beall and two other psychologists at the University of British Columbia suggests that breaking news about the Ebola epidemic also played a significant role in the election outcome.

Their paper contains two studies, both of which are interrupted time series designs. In this design, data that are routinely collected are examined to see if they change after a specific event. In the first study, they analyzed the aggregate results of all polls conducted between September 1 and November 1, 2014 that asked respondents whether they intended to vote for a Democrat or a Republican in their upcoming House election. The “interruption” occurred when Center for Disease Control announced the first Ebola case in the U. S. on September 30. The research question was whether the poll results changed from before to after that date.

The above results show support for the Republican candidate minus support for the Democratic candidate in the month (a) and the week (b) before and after the Ebola story broke. In both cases, the temporal trends were significantly different from before to after September 30. The before and after lines had different slopes, and the shift was in favor of the Republican candidates. The authors also collected data from Google on the daily search volume for the term “Ebola,” and found that it too was positively related to Republican voting intentions.

Beall and his colleagues examined two possible alternative explanations—concern about terrorism and the economy. They measured daily search volume for the term “ISIS,” and checked the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, which was dropping at the time. Interest in ISIS was (surprisingly) negatively related to Republican voting intentions and the stock market had no significant effect.

In their second study, the authors looked at the 34 Senate races. They computed 34 state-specific polling averages by subtracting Democratic voting intentions from Republican intentions. Then they subtracted the September results from the October results. Thus, a higher number would indicate a shift toward the Republican candidate. The aggregate results showed a significant increase in Republican voting intentions after September 30.

However, not all states shifted in the same direction. Using Cook’s Partisan Voter Index, they determined whether each state had voted more for Republicans or Democrats in recent years. Then they analyzed the data separately for “red” and “blue” states. The results are shown below.

The changes were in the direction of the state’s dominant political party. In the red states, the Republican candidate did better after September 30. In the blue states, the Ebola scare seemed to help the Democrat, although the effect was smaller. This could also be interpreted as a shift toward the favorite, since candidates who were leading before September 30 tended to do even better after that date.

This study is part of a small but increasing body of research which shows that external threats that cause fear in the population seem to work to the advantage of conservative political candidates. In a previous post, I reported on a British study which indicated that the 2005 London bombings increased prejudice toward Muslims. More to the point is a 2004 study in which reminding participants of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center increased support for President George W. Bush in his campaign against John Kerry. These studies are consistent with older research suggesting that social threats are associated with an increase in authoritarianism in the U. S. population. Authoritarian attitudes are characterized by obedience to authority, hostility toward minority groups and a high degree of conformity to social norms.

Surprisingly, Beall and his colleagues did not mention terror management theory as a way of understanding their results. According to this theory, human awareness of the inevitability of death—called mortality salience—creates existential terror and the need to manage this terror. One way people manage terror is through defensive efforts to validate their own cultural world views—those attitudes that give their lives meaning and purpose. Previous research suggests that mortality salience results primarily in conservative shifts in attitudes, including support for harsher punishment for moral transgressors, increased attachment to charismatic leaders, and increases in religiosity and patriotism. (A charismatic leader is one whose influence depends on citizen identification with the leader or the nation-state, as in “Make America great again.”) The Bush v. Kerry study mentioned in the preceding paragraph was intended to be a test of terror management theory.

One of the effects of saturation coverage of the Ebola epidemic was to remind people of the possibility of their own death and that of loved ones. The results of the 2014 House elections are consistent with a terror management interpretation. The Senate results do not contradict the theory, since there was an overall shift in favor of Republican candidates, but they add an additional detail. In states that usually voted Democratic, the Ebola scare increased support for Democrats. If mortality salience causes people to reaffirm their cultural world views, this could have produced a shift toward liberalism in states in which the majority of citizens held progressive attitudes.

Research findings such as these suggest the possibility that political parties and the corporate media might strategically exaggerate threats in order to influence the outcomes of elections. Willer found that government-issued terror alerts between 2001 and 2004 were associated with stronger approval ratings of President Bush. Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security at the time, later admitted that he was pressured by the White House to increase the threat level before the 2004 election. Since that time, it has become routine for Republicans to emphasize threats to the public’s well-being more than Democrats, and evidence from the 2016 presidential debates suggests that the media gave greater attention to Republican issues.

Republicans made Ebola an issue in the 2014 election, claiming that President Obama was failing to adequately protect public health and arguing that he should close the borders and not allow Americans suffering from the virus back into the country for treatment. In retrospect, news coverage of the threat of Ebola appears to have created unnecessary panic. Analysis of the motives of the media decision makers is complicated by the knowledge that they also exaggerate threats because they believe that increasing public fear leads to higher ratings. Media Matters for America presented data showing that coverage of Ebola plummeted immediately after the 2014 election was over (see below). However, I know of no “smoking gun” showing that the corporate media deliberately created panic in order to help Republican candidates.

 

Addendum

It’s interesting to speculate about how the coronavirus affected the 2020 Democratic primary contest. The first known American death due to COVID-19 occurred near Seattle on February 28. The sudden reversal of fortune in which the most conservative candidate Joe Biden burst into the delegate lead at the expense of the most liberal candidate Bernie Sanders began with the South Carolina primary on Saturday, February 29, and continued with the Super Tuesday contests on March 3. Over that weekend, one of the top news stories was the dramatic spike in the number of infections in Europe. President Trump finally declared a national emergency on March 13, by which time the Democratic contest was essentially over. It seems plausible that the coronavirus was a background factor that helped convince Democrats not to risk going into the 2020 election with a candidate that Trump might brand a socialist, and to choose a more familiar candidate.

I’m not suggesting that the coronavirus will guarantee the reelection of President Trump or the election of any other Republican candidate. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the data in Beall’s study were collected within just a few days of the peak of publicity surrounding the Ebola virus. A lot can happen between now and November. In the unlikely event that the coronavirus is no longer a problem, its effect on the elections may be minimal. In the case of the president, the success with which he is perceived to have responded the emergency should logically be more important than the existence of the emergency itself. But the polling done thus far suggests that there is very little agreement among partisans on how effectively Trump has dealt with the crisis. And the Ebola study suggests that the pandemic could even influence the outcomes of down-ballot races for political offices have no direct effect on the epidemic or our recovery from it.

If nothing else, Beall’s research should alert us to the importance social context during an election, including external threats that are sometimes overlooked because they are not explicitly political. It should also make us mindful of politicians and media sources that attempt to either exaggerate or downplay these events.

The Political Uses of Fear

Politics, Social psychology, War and peace, , ,
Auschwitz

This post returns to a theme I’ve discussed before: Events that evoke fear in the population, and the publicity given to those events, can cause conservative shifts in public attitudes and work to the advantage of right-wing politicians. In previous posts, I’ve reported on the effects of terrorist attacks and the spread of the Ebola virus. A new study by a group of Israeli and American psychologists headed by Daphna Canetti looks at the effect of reminders of the Holocaust on Israeli public opinion. As they point out, in spite of the passage of over 70 years, the collective trauma of the Holocaust is still a central component of Jewish identity, and Israeli politicians often refer to alleged “lessons” of the Holocaust.

In the first of four studies, a community sample of 57 Jewish Israelis was asked to complete a packet of questionnaires. They were randomly assigned to the Holocaust-salience condition or or one of two control groups. The Holocaust salience group was given this instruction:

Please think about the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust. What thoughts do you have about the Holocaust? Please briefly describe the emotions that you have when you think about the murder of six million Jews during the holocaust.

In one control group, they were asked to think about “your personal death” rather than the Holocaust. In a second control group, the Holocaust was replace by “severe physical pain.” Subsequently, participants were asked to what extent they defined themselves as Zionists, and filled out an 11-item questionnaire measuring support for military rather than diplomatic solutions to Israel’s conflict with Iran, i.e., “Israeli Defense Forces should strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

The results showed that participants in the Holocaust-salience condition showed greater support for an aggressive foreign policy than participants in either the Death or Pain conditions, and that the effect of Holocaust salience on militancy was mediated by ideological support for Zionism. That is, Holocaust salience increased endorsement of Zionism, which in turn increased support for a militant foreign policy. (Please see this previous post for an explanation of how mediation is tested.)

Experiment 2 was designed to demonstrate that thinking about the Holocaust does not inevitably increase support for warlike solutions to problems. It depends on how the Holocaust is framed. Framing refers to the way in which information is presented. It involves selecting some aspects of a situation and making them more salient. For example, people are more likely to choose to have an operation if they are told that there is a 75% chance they will live than if they are told that there is a 25% chance they will die.

In this study, participants were assigned to either the Holocaust-Jewish condition, in which the Holocaust was framed as “a crime against the Jewish people,” the Holocaust-Human condition, in which it was described as “a crime against humanity,” or the Pain control group. In addition to the previous questions, participants were asked about their willingness to compromise in order to achieve peace with the Palestinians. The results showed that only the Holocaust-Jewish frame increased support for warlike policies toward the Iranians and the Palestinians, and once again, the effect was mediated by identification with Zionism.

The final two studies attempted to bring a touch of realism to the previous laboratory experiments. On January 27, Israel celebrates Holocaust Remembrance Day. At midday, a siren goes off and everyone is asked to stop whatever they’re doing and think about the Holocaust for a minute. There are also Holocaust-themed events and programs in the mass media. In Study 3, 157 participants completed a questionnaire about their participation in Holocaust Day activities. As expected, the greater their personal participation in Holocaust Remembrance Day, the greater their support for Zionism and a militant foreign policy.

It should be noted that this study does not support the claim that participation in Holocaust Remembrance Day causes pro-war attitudes. It is equally possible that more conservative Israelis participated in more Holocaust Day activities.

Study 4 was a survey of a representative sample of 867 Israeli Jews. Although the first three studies involved temporary increases in the salience of the Holocaust, the authors were also interested in long-term exposure to Holocaust imagery. Holocaust survivors and their descendants can be expected to think about the Holocaust more often than average Israelis. Therefore, they compared a Holocaust group, consisting of Holocaust survivors, or the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, to a non-Holocaust group. The second variable was personal exposure to political violence. It was measured by asking participants whether they had suffered an injury to themselves, a family member or a friend as a result of a rocket or terror attack, or whether they had personally witnessed a terror attack or its immediate aftermath.

Neither Holocaust survival nor personal exposure to terrorism alone predicted attitudes toward war and peace, but those respondents who were both from Holocaust survivor families and had personal experience with political violence held Zionist attitudes, were more politically militant and were less willing to compromise for peace. The authors concluded that both short-term and long-term exposure to Holocaust imagery encouraged Israeli citizens to generalize from the Holocaust to Israel’s current conflicts with its neighbors, and to support aggressive military solutions to those conflicts.

It would be presumptuous of me to suggest what lessons Israelis should take from the Holocaust. However, it is not obvious that the only conclusion that follows from the Holocaust is that they should refuse to negotiate with their adversaries, or that they should engage in preemptive attacks on them. War crimes can sometimes be prevented by making peace.

In October 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech that Adolf Hitler had not intended to exterminate the Jews, but that the idea had been personally suggested to him by a Palestinian, the grand mufti of Jerusalem. His comments were denounced by Israeli historians as a lie and a disgrace, but, given his current political stance, it’s easy to see why Netanyahu would want to encourage such a belief. If Canetti’s studies are widely publicized by the Israeli media, Israelis can be forewarned about the cynical misuse of Holocaust imagery for political advantage.

You may also be interested in reading:

Are Terrorists Getting What They Want?

Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections?

Deep Background

Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections?

Media, Politics, Social psychology, , ,

Republicans did very well on Election Day 2014, gaining control of the Senate for the first time in eight years and increasing their majority in the House of Representatives. Most pundits attributed these results to low turnout by Democrats in a non-presidential election year and to President Obama’s poor approval ratings, due primarily to the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act earlier that year. But a recent paper by Alec Beall and two other psychologists at the University of British Columbia suggests that breaking news about the Ebola epidemic also played a significant role in the election outcome.

Their paper contains two studies, both of which are interrupted time series designs. In this design, data that are routinely collected are examined to see if they change after a specific event. In the first study, they analyzed the aggregate results of all polls conducted between September 1 and November 1, 2014 that asked respondents whether they intended to vote for a Democrat or a Republican in their upcoming House election. The “interruption” occurred when Center for Disease Control announced the first Ebola case in the U. S. on September 30. The research question was whether the poll results changed from before to after that date.

The above results show support for the Republican candidate minus support for the Democratic candidate in the month and the week before and after the Ebola story broke. In both cases, the temporal trends were significantly different from before to after September 30. The before and after lines had different slopes, and the shift was in favor of the Republican candidates. The authors also collected data from Google on the daily search volume for the term “Ebola,” and found that it too was positively related to Republican voting intentions.

Beall and his colleagues examined two possible alternative explanations—concern about terrorism and the economy. They measured daily search volume for the term “ISIS,” and checked the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, which was dropping at the time. Interest in ISIS was (surprisingly) negatively related to Republican voting intentions and the stock market had no significant effect.

In their second study, the authors looked at the 34 Senate races. They computed 34 state-specific polling averages by subtracting Democratic voting intentions from Republican intentions. Then they subtracted the September results from the October results. Thus, a higher number would indicate a shift toward the Republican candidate. The aggregate results showed a significant increase in Republican voting intentions after September 30.

However, not all states shifted in the same direction. Using Cook’s Partisan Voter Index, they determined whether each state had voted more for Republicans or Democrats in recent years. Then they analyzed the data separately for “red” and “blue” states. The results are shown below.

The changes were in the direction of the state’s dominant political party. In the red states, the Republican candidate did better after September 30. In the blue states, the Ebola scare seemed to help the Democrat, although the effect was smaller. This could also be interpreted as a shift toward the favorite, since candidates who were leading before September 30 tended to do even better after that date.

This study is part of a small but increasing body of research which shows that external threats that cause fear in the population seem to work to the advantage of conservative political candidates. In a previous post, I reported on a British study which indicated that the 2005 London bombings increased prejudice toward Muslims. More to the point is a 2004 study in which reminding participants of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center increased support for President George W. Bush in his campaign against John Kerry. These studies are consistent with older research suggesting that social threats are associated with an increase in authoritarianism in the U. S. population. Authoritarian attitudes are characterized by obedience to authority, hostility toward minority groups and a high degree of conformity to social norms.

Surprisingly, Beall and his colleagues did not mention terror management theory as a way of understanding their results. According to this theory, human awareness of the inevitability of death—called mortality salience—creates existential terror and the need to manage this terror. One way people manage terror is through defensive efforts to validate their own cultural world views—those attitudes that give their lives meaning and purpose. Previous research suggests that mortality salience results primarily in conservative shifts in attitudes, including support for harsher punishment for moral transgressors, increased attachment to charismatic leaders, and increases in religiosity and patriotism. (A charismatic leader is one whose influence depends on citizen identification with the leader or the nation-state, as in “Make America great again.”) The Bush v. Kerry study mentioned in the preceding paragraph was intended to be a test of terror management theory.

One of the effects of saturation coverage of the Ebola epidemic was to remind people of the possibility of their own death and that of loved ones. The results of the 2014 House elections are consistent with a terror management interpretation. The Senate results do not contradict the theory, since there was an overall shift in favor of Republican candidates, but they add an additional detail. In states that usually voted Democratic, the Ebola scare increased support for Democrats. If mortality salience causes people to reaffirm their cultural world views, this could have produced a shift toward liberalism in states in which the majority of citizens held progressive attitudes.

Research findings such as these suggest the possibility that political parties and the corporate media might strategically exaggerate threats in order to influence the outcomes of elections. Willer found that government-issued terror alerts between 2001 and 2004 were associated with stronger approval ratings of President Bush. Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security at the time, later admitted that he was pressured by the White House to increase the threat level before the 2004 election. Since that time, it has become routine for Republicans to emphasize threats to the public’s well-being more than Democrats, and evidence from the 2016 presidential debates suggests that the media gave greater attention to Republican issues.

Republicans made Ebola an issue in the 2014 election, claiming that President Obama was failing to adequately protect public health and arguing that he should close the borders and not allow Americans suffering from the virus back into the country for treatment. In retrospect, news coverage of the threat of Ebola appears to have created unnecessary panic. Analysis of the motives of the media decision makers is complicated by the knowledge that they also exaggerate threats because they believe that increasing public fear leads to higher ratings. Media Matters for America presented data showing that coverage of Ebola plummeted immediately after the 2014 election was over (see below). However, I know of no “smoking gun” showing that the corporate media deliberately created panic in order to help Republican candidates.

You may also be interested in reading:

Are Terrorists Getting What They Want?

Framing the Debates

Trump’s Trump Card