Social Amplification Dominates Collective Hazard Response

TL;DR

This paper presents a model linking hazard exposure and social emotional contagion, revealing that social amplification often dominates physical hazard effects and influences societal responses during crises like COVID-19.

Contribution

The authors develop an interpretable model coupling hazard exposure with networked emotional contagion, quantifying when social amplification surpasses direct hazard effects.

Findings

Social influence exceeded hazard forcing in over 80% of US states during COVID-19.

Amplified stress signals covaried with major economic indices.

The model enables prediction of societal emotional tipping points.

Abstract

Large-scale hazards affect societies not only through direct physical impacts but also through emotions that spread across populations. Fueled by social amplification and networked communication, collective emotions often diverge markedly from underlying physical threats, pressuring policymakers toward suboptimal decisions that erode long-term societal resilience and misalign risk governance priorities. Yet when exactly these collective emotions mirror hazard severity and when they are warped by social dynamics remains poorly understood. We introduce a compact, interpretable model that couples hazard exposure with networked emotional contagion and identifies the transition from proportionate responses to an amplification regime sustained by negativity bias. Applying this framework to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, we integrate state-level epidemiological data with large-scale stress signals inferred from Twitter/X activity. Our analysis shows that social influence outweighed direct hazard forcing in over 80\% of U.S. states during the study period, and that amplified stress covaries with major economic indices. These findings reveal a measurable regularity in societal hazard response, enabling quantitative anticipation of collective emotional tipping points and supporting community resilience under large-scale hazards.