Psychology Research and Behavior Management (Aug 2022)
How Social Media Influences Public Attitudes to COVID-19 Governance Policy: An Analysis Based on Cognitive-Affective Model
Abstract
Ruixia Han,1,2 Jian Xu1– 3 1School of Media and Communication, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, People’s Republic of China; 2Institute of Cultural Innovation and Youth Development, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, People’s Republic of China; 3Institute for Urban Governance, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200052, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Ruixia Han; Jian Xu, School of Media and Communication, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, People’s Republic of China, Tel/Fax +86 21-34202854, Email [email protected]; [email protected]: Based on the cognitive-affective model, this paper examines how social media affects the public cognitive and affective factors, further influence their attitudes towards COVID-19 governance policy.Methods: Through an online survey, we measured individual COVID-19 policy attitude, social media use and other related factors of 1222 respondents from 12 countries, and based on this, we carried out regression and mediation analysis on the data to obtain the research results.Results: From the perspective of cognitive factors, the public perception of the severity of the COVID-19 itself does not significantly affect their attitudes towards governance policy. On the contrary, the evaluation on government governance performance, risks and governance anticipations have more significant impacts. Among the affective factors, personal anxiety and patriotism significantly affect the formation of public attitudes, personal anxiety is positively correlated, and patriotism is negatively correlated. It is important to note that nationalism has no significant influence on public attitudes to COVID-19 policy on a global scale.Conclusion: (1) Social media influences the public COVID-19 policy attitudes through their moderating effect on affective and cognitive factors. (2) The impact of social media on affective pathways is more significant than that on cognitive pathways. (3) The positive moderating effect of social media on patriotism obscures the tendency of strict governance of COVID-19 caused by aggravating people’s anxiety.Keywords: Covid-19, public attitude, social media, cognition, affection, patriotism
