https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00511-z
Research
Attitudes towards migration in a COVID-19 context: testing a behavioral immune system hypothesis with Twitter data
1
Social Complexity Research Center, Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile
2
Faculty of Business and Economics, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile
3
Department of Computer Science, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile
4
National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA), Santiago, Chile
5
Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, Universidad de las Américas, Santiago, Chile
Received:
14
August
2024
Accepted:
21
November
2024
Published online:
27
November
2024
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 appear to be mostly against the BIS hypothesis, with some faint exceptions, 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.
Key words: Attitude analysis / Migration / COVID-19 / Behavioral Immune System
© The Author(s) 2024
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