Publication date: Aug 26, 2024
We explore the impact of narratives on beliefs and policy opinions through a survey experiment that exposes US subjects to two media-based explanations of the causes of COVID-19. The Lab Narrative ascribes the pandemic to human error and scientific misconduct in a Chinese lab, and the Nature Narrative describes the natural causes of the virus. First, we find that both narratives influence individual beliefs about COVID-19 origins. More precisely, individual beliefs tend to be swayed in the direction of the version of the facts to which one is more exposed generating a potential source of polarization by exposure. Second, only the Nature Narrative unidirectionally affects policy opinions by increasing people’s preferences toward climate protection and trust in science, therefore representing a channel for one-sided polarization by exposure. Finally, we also explore the existence of heterogeneous effects of our narratives, finding that the Lab Narrative leads to opinion polarization between Republican- and Democratic-leaning states on climate change and foreign trade. This indicates the existence of an additional channel that can lead policy opinions to diverge, which we denote polarization by social context.
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| Concepts | Keywords |
|---|---|
| Chinese | COVID-19 |
| Democratic | Humans |
| Lab | Narration |
| Republican | Pandemics |
| Virus | Public Opinion |
| SARS-CoV-2 | |
| Surveys and Questionnaires |
Semantics
| Type | Source | Name |
|---|---|---|
| disease | MESH | causes |
| disease | MESH | COVID-19 |
| drug | DRUGBANK | Coenzyme M |
| disease | VO | time |
| disease | IDO | process |
| disease | VO | Advent |
| drug | DRUGBANK | Water |
| disease | VO | USA |
| disease | MESH | death |
| disease | MESH | emergency |
| disease | MESH | educational status |
| disease | VO | population |
| drug | DRUGBANK | Pentaerythritol tetranitrate |
| disease | VO | effective |
| disease | VO | vein |
| drug | DRUGBANK | Ilex paraguariensis leaf |
| disease | VO | Gap |
| disease | VO | document |
| disease | VO | protocol |
| disease | VO | viable |
| drug | DRUGBANK | Trestolone |
| drug | DRUGBANK | Aspartame |
| disease | VO | monthly |
| disease | VO | effectiveness |
| drug | DRUGBANK | Silver |
| disease | VO | organ |
| disease | VO | frequency |
| disease | IDO | country |
| disease | VO | vaccine |
| drug | DRUGBANK | Trihexyphenidyl |
| drug | DRUGBANK | Serine |