Moral and emotional influences on attitude stability towards COVID-19 vaccines on social media

TL;DR

This study examines how moral values and emotional language in social media posts influence the stability of attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines, revealing patterns that can inform more effective public health messaging.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how moral foundations and emotional expressions relate to attitude stability on social media regarding COVID-19 vaccines.

Findings

Emotional language correlates with greater stance variation, except for anger and surprise.

Liberty is linked to more stable vaccine attitudes.

Fairness and sanctity are associated with more attitude fluctuation.

Abstract

Effective public health messaging benefits from understanding antecedents to unstable attitudes that are more likely to be influenced. This work investigates the relationship between moral and emotional bases for attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines and variance in stance. Evaluating nearly 1 million X users over a two month period, we find that emotional language in tweets about COVID-19 vaccines is largely associated with more variation in stance of the posting user, except anger and surprise. The strength of COVID-19 vaccine attitudes associated with moral values varies across foundations. Most notably, liberty is consistently used by users with no or less variation in stance, while fairness and sanctity are used by users with more variation. Our work has implications for designing constructive pro-vaccine messaging and identifying receptive audiences.