Abstract
Partisan patterns of compliance with public health measures are a feature of early COVID‐19 responses. In many cases, these differences in behaviour relate to pre‐existing group identities. However, in times of rapid societal change, novel opinion‐based groups can emerge and provide a new basis for partisan identification and divergent collective behaviour. Here, we use network methods to map the emergence of opposing opinion‐based groups and assess their implications for public health behaviour. In a longitudinal study, we tracked public health attitudes and self‐reported behaviour in a sample of UK participants over four time points. Network visualisation reveal a rift in attitudinal alignment over time and the genesis of two distinct groups characterised by trust, or distrust, in science (Study 1a; N = 253). These groups also diverge in public health behaviour. In a brief follow‐up study (N = 206), we find that this opinion polarization partially reflects underlying societal divides. We discuss implications for opinion‐based group research and public health campaigns.
Highlights
We describe these emergent opinion-based structures as factional to emphasize that they offer a new basis for identity alignment, as opposed to partisan structures that align with pre-existing socio-political identities
This study aims to (i) investigate whether emerging factions can be detected in public health attitude coordination and (ii) assess how this corresponds to public health behaviour
Group genesis We assessed how people in attitude-based clusters established at Study 1a differed in Brexit views, income, education, political orientation, and perceived social status
Summary
As previously seen during the Brexit debate in the United Kingdom, new ‘opinion-based groups’ (McGarty, Bliuc, Thomas, & Bongiorno, 2009) can emerge from social processes without clear relations to prior groups or socio-political structures. We describe these emergent opinion-based structures as factional to emphasize that they offer a new basis for identity alignment, as opposed to partisan structures that align with pre-existing socio-political identities. Economic and political attitudes polarized in the wake of the Great Recession (McCarty, Poole, & Rosenthal, 2016) and the election of Donald Trump (Maher, Igou, & Van Tilburg, 2018) This attitude polarization may build upon pre-existing rifts (e.g., political divides) but it is often not reducible to political or demographic categorizations (McGarty, et al, 2009). COVID-19 has spurred societal change at an alarming rate, and this too will shift the structure of attitudes in society
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