TY - JOUR
T1 - Pandemic and prejudice
T2 - Results from a national survey experiment
AU - Kaushal, Neeraj
AU - Lu, Yao
AU - Huang, Xiaoning
N1 - Funding Information:
This research is supported by Columbia Population Research Center, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, the Center for Pandemic Research at Columbia University and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2022 Kaushal et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2022/4
Y1 - 2022/4
N2 - Do health and economic shocks exacerbate prejudice towards racial/ethnic minority groups? We investigate this question in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic by collecting nationally representative survey data with an embedded experiment. Results show that priming COVID-19 salience has an immediate impact: compared to the control group, respondents in the treatment group reported increased prejudice towards East Asian and Hispanic colleagues. East Asians in the treatment group faced higher prejudicial responses from Americans living in counties with higher COVID-19 infections and those who lost jobs due to COVID-19, and fewer prejudicial responses in counties with a higher concentration of Asians. These results point to the salience of COVID-19 fueled health and economic insecurities in shaping prejudicial attitudes, specifically towards East Asians. County-level socioeconomic factors did not moderate the increased prejudicial attitudes toward Hispanics in the workplace. These findings highlight a dimension of prejudice, intensified during the pandemic, which has been largely underreported and therefore missing from the current discourse on this important topic.
AB - Do health and economic shocks exacerbate prejudice towards racial/ethnic minority groups? We investigate this question in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic by collecting nationally representative survey data with an embedded experiment. Results show that priming COVID-19 salience has an immediate impact: compared to the control group, respondents in the treatment group reported increased prejudice towards East Asian and Hispanic colleagues. East Asians in the treatment group faced higher prejudicial responses from Americans living in counties with higher COVID-19 infections and those who lost jobs due to COVID-19, and fewer prejudicial responses in counties with a higher concentration of Asians. These results point to the salience of COVID-19 fueled health and economic insecurities in shaping prejudicial attitudes, specifically towards East Asians. County-level socioeconomic factors did not moderate the increased prejudicial attitudes toward Hispanics in the workplace. These findings highlight a dimension of prejudice, intensified during the pandemic, which has been largely underreported and therefore missing from the current discourse on this important topic.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85128135537&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85128135537&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0265437
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0265437
M3 - Article
C2 - 35417461
AN - SCOPUS:85128135537
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 17
JO - PloS one
JF - PloS one
IS - 4 April
M1 - e0265437
ER -