Abstract
When faced with adverse circumstances, there may be a tendency for individuals, agencies, and governments to search for a target to assign blame. Our focus will be on the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, where racial groups, political parties, countries, and minorities have been blamed for spreading, producing or creating the virus. Blame—here defined as attributing causality, responsibility, intent, or foresight to someone/something for a fault or wrong—has already begun to damage modern society and medical practice in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak. Evidence from past and current pandemics suggest that this tendency to seek blame affects international relations, promotes unwarranted devaluation of health professionals, and prompts a spike of racism and discrimination. By drawing on social and cognitive psychology theories, we provide a framework that helps to understand (1) the effect of blame in pandemics, (2) when people blame, whom they blame, and (3) how blame detrimentally affects the COVID-19 response. Ultimately, we provide a path to inform health messaging to reduce blaming tendencies, based on social psychological principles for health communication.
Highlights
Blame is a feature of individual, organizational, system and government responses to COVID19 pandemic worldwide
The World Health Organization has suggested that the language used around pandemics is critical to limiting blame and stigma, but many world leaders have paid no heed to this advice, calling COVID-19 by regional language or variants by their location of origin (World Health Organisation [WHO], 2020)
When a minority group is blamed for a pandemic, the social identity approach would argue that this means the pandemic is no longer a problem of we but rather them (Tajfel, 1974b; Tajfel et al, 1979)
Summary
Blame is a feature of individual, organizational, system and government responses to COVID19 pandemic worldwide. There exists a long history of blaming “others” for diseases in more recent times, such as the “Mexican Swine Flu” in 2009 (Cohn, 2012; Habicht et al, 2020) This effect of blame has direct negative consequences on managing pandemics. When exposed to the term “China-virus,” all participants of the study became more likely to blame Chinese residents (Porumbescu et al, 2020) While these studies have shown that certain people are more likely to blame certain targets, and that blame can spread quickly, these studies say little on the mechanics of blame in COVID-19. At time of writing, little direct psychological research has been done on blame and COVID-19 beyond commentary; a cursory search on this topic revealed only four papers that sought to understand blame in COVID-19. We consolidate a socio-cognitive model of blame (Malle et al, 2014) and social identity research (Jetten et al, 2020) to inform a model of blame in COVID-19
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