Beginning in March 2020, my Ph.D. program became digital as many US colleges did not invite students to return from spring break. My advisors and peers formed a group and set out to quickly add to the body of social science pandemic research that was being produced. This manuscript is one of the projects that our team worked together to create. 

In this research, we focused on the religiosity of communities and government mitigation policies such as shelter-in-place directives. We used shelter-in-place directives as an intervention in a quasi-experiment to examine adherence over 30 days as a function of religiosity in the most populous metropolitan areas in the United States. When a shelter-in-place directive had not been imposed, religiosity did not affect people’s movements. However, when the directive was imposed, higher religiosity resulted in less adherence to shelter-in-place directives. 

DeFranza, D., Lindow, M., Harrison, K., Mishra, A., & Mishra, H. (2021). Religion and reactance to COVID-19 mitigation guidelines. American Psychologist, 76(5), 744–754. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000717 

Beginning in March 2020, my Ph.D. program became digital as many US colleges did not invite students to return from spring break. My advisors and peers formed a group and set out to quickly add to the body of social science pandemic research that was being produced. This manuscript is one of the projects that our team worked together to create. 

Early behavioral research during the pandemic showed that conservatives were less likely to adhere to health directives, which contradicts a body of work suggesting that conservative ideology emphasizes a rule-abiding, loss aversion, and prevention focus. We reconcile this contradiction by analyzing the semantic content of local press releases, federal press releases, and localized tweets during the first month of the government response to COVID-19 in the United States. Controlling for factors such as COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths, local economic indicators, and more, we find that online expressions of fear in conservative areas lead to an increase in adherence to public health recommendations concerning COVID-19, and that expressions of fear in government press releases are a significant predictor of expressed fear on Twitter. 

Mike Lindow, David DeFranza, Arul Mishra, and Himanshu Mishra. 2021. Partisanship and Fear are Associated with Resistance to COVID-19 Directives. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 25–33, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.