Abstract
Successful navigation of the Covid-19 pandemic is predicated on public cooperation with safety measures and appropriate perception of risk, in which emotion and attention play important roles. Signatures of public emotion and attention are present in social media data, thus natural language analysis of this text enables near-to-real-time monitoring of indicators of public risk perception. We compare key epidemiological indicators of the progression of the pandemic with indicators of the public perception of the pandemic constructed from sim 20 million unique Covid-19-related tweets from 12 countries posted between 10th March and 14th June 2020. We find evidence of psychophysical numbing: Twitter users increasingly fixate on mortality, but in a decreasingly emotional and increasingly analytic tone. Semantic network analysis based on word co-occurrences reveals changes in the emotional framing of Covid-19 casualties that are consistent with this hypothesis. We also find that the average attention afforded to national Covid-19 mortality rates is modelled accurately with the Weber–Fechner and power law functions of sensory perception. Our parameter estimates for these models are consistent with estimates from psychological experiments, and indicate that users in this dataset exhibit differential sensitivity by country to the national Covid-19 death rates. Our work illustrates the potential utility of social media for monitoring public risk perception and guiding public communication during crisis scenarios.
Highlights
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about widespread disruption to human life
For most countries, the separation between words associated with Death and Affect in our approximate semantic networks—as measured by QLIWC and fDeath—becomes more pronounced as the national daily deaths rise, and that this relationship is generally weaker in the null model realisations
We found that the National Linguistic Scores [NLSs, see Eq (4)] associated with emotion and affect decrease as the pandemic intensifies
Summary
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about widespread disruption to human life. The degree to which these restrictions have been enforced by law has varied over time and by location, and their success in mitigating public health risks depends on the extent of cooperation on the part of the public. A key determinant of the public’s behaviour and their cooperation with state-imposed social restrictions is the public’s emotional response to, and their perception of the the risk presented by, the pandemic. The evolution of emotions and risk perception. Our goal is to contribute to bettering this understanding, and we do so by exploring the empirical relationships present between the progression of the Covid pandemic and the public’s perception of the risk posed by the pandemic
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