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In partnership with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Ripple Research investigated public reactions to pandemic management between January and July 2020. We used our proprietary data tools to conduct large-scale Sentiment Mining and Emotion Analysis, backed by state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing Tools. We sought to identify how trust - a nebulous, socio-political construct - was reflected in reactions to policies and statements by authorities.
Our dataset consisted of over 830 million online interactions from over a hundred media channels which collectively have a reach of over 6 trillion views across nine countries.
We found 4 Pathways used by authorities to build, maintain and regain trust, collectively referred to as the 'Trust in a Crisis Playbook' in our analysis.
The COVID-19 pandemic came to dominate our lives in stunning fashion. In the space of four months between December 2019 and April 2020, the infection had spread at an astonishing rate, prompting harsh lockdowns in countries across the world. Fundamental aspects of our lived existence – jobs, social gatherings, family dynamics and mobility – now stood on wobbly ground, defined as much by fear as by uncertainty. Throughout 2020, the world spent considerable time and energy on trying to learn more about the virus and react to the multi-dimensional crises that threw governments, people and institutions out of gear. Within this global upheaval, a critical mediator between institutions and citizens was trust- a socio-political construct which determines how citizens respond to governance and crisis management. Our analysis was designed to uncover how leaders and authorities gained, maintained and restored trust as they managed the COVID-19 pandemic between January and July 2020. By tracking emotional responses to the pandemic expressed on open-source social media during the study period, we aimed to understand how authorities were leveraging – or forcing – trust in institutions in order to manage public sentiment and obedience in reaction to the pandemic.
In partnership with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Ripple Research investigated public reactions to pandemic management between January and July 2020. We used our proprietary data tools to conduct large-scale Sentiment Mining and Emotion Analysis, backed by state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing Tools that allowed us to categorise and understand not just what people were saying on social and traditional media, but also how they were expressing themselves. Our dataset – one of the largest assembled for this purpose – consisted of 830 million online interactions from over a hundred media channels which collectively have a reach of over 6 trillion views across nine countries. We scrutinized data from India, New Zealand, South Africa, The United States of America, The United Kingdom, Sweden, South Korea and Singapore.
Methodology
We conducted large-scale sentiment analysis to identify where, when and how people were responding to pandemic management. We used natural language processing, text analysis and computational linguistics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjective information. We added further specificity to our study by identifying trends across six distinct emotional responses (adapting Ekman’s categories to our studies): anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.
At various stages, we refined and improved our tools and processing capacity to canvass the complex dataset more quickly and efficiently. Our analysis was designed to clarify, categorize and stratify the mass of unstructured data on the internet. It went one step further, mapping inherently human emotions and sentiments expressed in response to the often-painful pandemic management measures the nine countries resorted to. We mapped the responses as ‘trend lines’ (represented as line graphs, available below). In some cases, spikes in various emotions were unrelated to pandemic management measures – for example, the reaction to a BTS album release in South Korea. In our full report, available on request, we discuss these incidents in detail.
Findings
The pandemic measures taken by public institutions in each of the nine countries were publicly known because of tweets, official releases, news media and social media. Combining this information with the results of our own sentiment mining, we identified four pathways used by leaders to leverage trust during the pandemic, collectively referred to as the Trust in a Crisis Playbook. A brief overview of these analyses is presented below.
1) Trust Through Legitimization: Legitimization involves the positioning of a leader or authority in such a way as to justify their actions as appropriate. We observed this strategy in action in all nine countries- a natural consequence of lockdown-like measures being the preferred pandemic response worldwide. This pathway requires leaders to build trust in Input Legitimacy (the mechanisms and means used to enact management measures) and Output Legitimacy (the actual outcomes of pandemic management measures). In South Africa, for example, we observed a breakdown of trust and output legitimacy due to a poorly coordinated inter-Ministerial response.
2) Trust Through Competence: This form of trust originates from the perception that a leader or authority is competent and well-equipped to handle a crisis. Despite several sub-crises, we observed this trust pathway in action in Singapore, South Korea and China. In each of these countries, a strong administrative system backed by public trust encouraged citizens to adopt positive-sum mutual benefit measures such as mask-wearing and track-and-trace tools. In all three countries, this pathway appeared to be justified: when oversights or missteps took place, authorities quickly initiated corrective action. This helped restore public trust even as coercive or quasi-coercive measures – often violative of individual privacy – were put into place.
3) Trust Through Shared Beliefs: In India, The USA, the UK and Sweden, authorities sought to build trust by appealing to shared values and beliefs, often at the cost of creating an ‘other’ as a counterpoint to an ‘in-group’ dynamic. In India, this strategy involved appeals to national exceptionalism and history even as it created widespread hostility against minority communities accused of ‘spreading’ the virus intentionally. In the USA, similarly, President Donald Trump invalidated public health experts and dismissed the pandemic repeatedly in an effort to portray stability and administrative control. This trust pathway requires a ‘pivot’ around which a unifying narrative can be constructed, following which shared appeals can transcend actual outcomes and polarize the public imagination. In all three countries where this pathway was observed, the pandemic was indubitably mismanaged to varying degrees, but leaders appealed to shared values or cults of personality to suppress criticism and public scrutiny.
4) Trust Through Benevolence or Integrity: This trust pathway is shaped by the perception that an authority is acting benevolently in the best interest of citizens. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s pandemic management in New Zealand – marked by regular public outreach, empathy and adaptivity – typified this response. Her actions generated considerable trust and public obedience and, most importantly, cooperation. New Zealanders were encouraged to take personal and collective ownership of their well-being. Quick action against government officials who violated pandemic restrictions boosted Ms. Ardern’s popular public image, and the country’s success in curbing local transmission of the disease is a testament to the effectiveness of the ‘Benevolence Approach’.
Collectively, these approaches constitute the ‘Trust in a Crisis Playbook’.
What Comes Next?
As the pandemic continues along its unpredictable global trajectory, several questions remain. How will vaccination proceed? How will circumstances change as variants and strains appear? Will emotional responses reflect pandemic fatigue? At Ripple, we continue to examine public responses, using the incredible reach and diversity of social media to identify how people adapt to the inevitable continuity of the COVID-19 crisis. As Governments worldwide continue to resort to innovative and sometimes coercive measures to encourage public cooperation, more policy lessons will come to the surface. In a future post on vaccines, we will examine some of the public responses to vaccination programs, which were still several months from commencement at the time of this analysis.
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