Framing COVID‐19 as an existential threat predicts prejudice towards Chinese people via anxious arousal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We tested the hypothesis that perceived existential threat stemming from 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 a condition in which COVID‐19 was framed as a high existential threat to the United States or to a condition in which COVID‐19 was framed as a low existential threat to the United States. They then completed self‐report measures of anxious arousal as well as subtle and blatant prejudice towards Chinese people. As expected, participants in the high threat (vs. low threat) condition reported greater anxious arousal which, in turn, predicted greater subtle and blatant prejudice. The high threat (vs. low threat) condition also indirectly predicted greater subtle and blatant prejudice via greater anxious arousal. Results advance knowledge on the reactions people had to perceiving COVID‐19 as an existential threat during the early phase of the pandemic.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".