Attitudes Towards Migration in a COVID-19 Context: Testing a Behavioral Immune System Hypothesis with Twitter Data

TL;DR

This study investigates how COVID-19 influenced attitudes towards migrants on Twitter in Chile, testing the behavioral immune system hypothesis, and finds partial support with nuanced differences in user behavior and language use.

Contribution

It applies the behavioral immune system theory to social media data during a pandemic, revealing complex patterns in attitudes towards migrants.

Findings

Threatened users increased tweet production during the pandemic.

Empathetic users grew in number and tweet reach over time.

Language use differed between threatened and empathetic users.

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak implied many changes in the daily life of most of the world's population for a long time, prompting severe restrictions on sociality. The Behavioral Immune System (BIS) suggests that when facing pathogens, a psychological mechanism would be activated that, among other things, would generate an increase in prejudice and discrimination towards marginalized groups, including immigrants. This study aimed to test if people tend to enhance their rejection of minorities and foreign groups under the threat of contagious diseases, using the users' attitudes towards migrants in Twitter data from Chile, for pre-pandemic and pandemic contexts. Our results only partially support the BIS hypothesis, since threatened users increased their tweet production in the pandemic period, compared to empathetic users, but the latter grew in number and also increased the reach of their tweets between the two periods. We also found differences in the use of language between these types of users. Alternative explanations for these results may be context-dependent.