Abstract
The Boston Marathon bombing presents a rare opportunity to study how a disruptive event can trigger inter-communal emotions and expressions - where members of one community express feelings about and support for members of a distant community. In this work, we use over 180 million geocoded tweets over an entire month to study how Twitter users from different cities expressed three different emotions: fear, sympathy and solidarity, in reaction to the bombings. We capture spikes in fear in different cities by using sentiment and time-series analyses, and track expressions of sympathy and solidarity based on the emergent use of two hashtags, #prayforboston and #bostonstrong, widely adopted after the bombings. We find first that the extent to which communities outside Boston express these emotions is correlated with their geographic proximity, social network connections, and residents’ direct, physical experiences with Boston (captured by the number of citizens who had visited Boston recently). This general effect shows interesting differences across the different kinds of emotions, however. Analyses show that the extent to which residents of a city visit Boston is the best predictor of fear and solidarity expression, as well as a strong predictor of the expression of sympathy. The expression of fear is also directly related to the expression of solidarity. Our study has theoretical implications regarding the diffusion of information and emotional contagion as well as practical implications for understanding how important information and social support can be effectively collected and distributed to populations in need.
Highlights
The goal of terrorism is to spread fear
After the terrorist attacks of September, researchers documented the broad diffusion of fear and fear related responses, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, to cities outside of New York and countries outside of the US [ – ]. These findings suggest that various social connections between communities serve as channels over which emotional responses to terrorism are amplified [ ]
We examine the role that these three factors play in the expression of social support for Boston in terms of expressions of sympathy and solidarity
Summary
The goal of terrorism is to spread fear. Through the perpetration of spectacular violence, terrorists can induce irrational decisions in frightened populations, weakening their infrastructure and public confidence [ ] and, in some cases, persuading the population to give in to terrorist demands [ ]. The dynamics of fear are difficult to characterize, as they involve complex processes that operate at multiple levels. Individuals become afraid when they perceive a threat over which they believe they have little control [ , ]. These perceptions are formed by appraising stimuli from their physical environment and from social cues and context [ , ] provided through inter-personal conversations [ ], mass media [ ], and more recently, social media [ ]. In addition to being induced by perceptions of risk at the individual level, fear can be passed along through emotional contagion across social network ties [ , ]. Group processes participate in the spread of fear. When individuals identify themselves with a social group, they are likely to feel threatened when this group is threatened, even if they themselves are not in immediate danger [ ]
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