Framing COVID-19 as an Existential Threat Predicts Anxious Arousal and Prejudice towards Chinese People
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We tested the hypothesis that perceived existential threat of COVID-19 elicits anxious arousal, which can manifest in prejudice toward the perceived source of the threat (Chinese people). Americans (n = 474) were randomly assigned to an experimental condition in which COVID-19 was framed as an existential threat to the United States or a non-existential threat control condition. They then completed self-report measures of anxious arousal and blatant prejudice towards Chinese people. As expected, participants in the threat (vs. control) condition reported greater anxious arousal which, in turn, predicted greater blatant prejudice. Threat (vs. control) condition also indirectly predicted greater prejudice via greater anxious arousal. Results suggest that COVID-19 existential threat may diminish social capital, which would further degrade people’s health and well-being.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".