Collective Emotional Reaction to Societal Risks in China

Abstract

Modern China is exposed to many societal risks. The risk perception induced emotion at the individual level but their relationship on a large scale is costly to assess, while some social emotional reactions such as anger may evoke collective actions. The seven societal risk perceptions including social stability, daily life, resource & environment, public moral, government management, national security and economic & finance were gotten on the basis of the public searching behavior on Baidu search engine. The five public moods including Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust were obtained by analyzing the text content of daily Sina Weibo. The relationship between the societal risk perceptions and public moods using Granger causality analysis was that the societal risk perceptions are predictive of public moods but the effect of different kinds of societal risk perception is distinguishing. This research manifested that capturing public psychological characteristics on social media was feasible.