Kenneth A. Lachlan, PhD, is a Professor and Department Head; and Emily Hutter, MA, and Christine Gilbert, MA, are Graduate Assistants; all in the Department of Communication, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT.
Health Secur. 2021 Jan-Feb;19(1):21-30. doi: 10.1089/hs.2020.0176. Epub 2021 Jan 19.
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has created substantial challenges for public health officials who must communicate pandemic-related risks and recommendations to the public. Their efforts have been further hampered by the politicization of the pandemic, including media outlets that question the seriousness and necessity of protective actions. The availability of highly politicized news from online platforms has led to concerns about the notion of "echo chambers," whereby users are exposed only to information that conforms to and reinforces their existing beliefs. Using a sample of 5,000 US residents, we explored their information-seeking tendencies, reliance on conservative and liberal online media, risk perceptions, and mitigation behaviors. The results of our study suggest that risk perceptions may vary across preferences for conservative or liberal bias; however, our results do not support differences in the mitigation behavior across patterns of media use. Further, our findings do not support the notion of echo chambers, but rather suggest that people with lower information-seeking behavior may be more strongly influenced by politicized COVID-19 news. Risk estimates converge at higher levels of information seeking, suggesting that high information seekers consume news from sources across the political spectrum. These results are discussed in terms of their theoretical implications for the study of online echo chambers and their practical implications for public health officials and emergency managers.
2019 年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）大流行给公共卫生官员带来了巨大挑战，他们必须向公众传达与大流行相关的风险和建议。大流行的政治化，包括质疑保护措施的严肃性和必要性的媒体，使他们的努力进一步受到阻碍。在线平台上提供的高度政治化的新闻引发了人们对“回音室”概念的担忧，即用户只接触到符合并强化其现有信念的信息。我们使用了 5000 名美国居民的样本，探讨了他们的信息搜索倾向、对保守派和自由派在线媒体的依赖、风险认知以及缓解行为。我们的研究结果表明，风险认知可能因对保守派或自由派偏见的偏好而有所不同；然而，我们的结果并不支持在媒体使用模式上存在缓解行为的差异。此外，我们的研究结果不支持回音室的概念，而是表明信息搜索行为较少的人可能更容易受到政治化的 COVID-19 新闻的影响。风险估计在较高的信息搜索水平上趋于一致，这表明高信息搜索者会从政治光谱的各个来源获取新闻。这些结果从在线回音室研究的理论意义和公共卫生官员和应急管理人员的实际意义方面进行了讨论。
