JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

President Joe Biden signed an executive action on Jan 26, 2021 directing federal agencies to combat hate crimes and racism against Asians that have percolated during the Covid-19 pandemic—with numerous reports of online vitriol and offline hate crimes against Asians reported worldwide. This is one of the first known empirical studies to dynamically test whether global societal sentiments toward Asians have become more negative, month-by-month, from pre-pandemic (October’19) to May’20.

Objective:

To test whether global societal sentiments toward Asians, across 20 countries, have become more negative, month-by-month, from pre-pandemic (October 2019) to May 2020, and the pandemic (incidence and mortality rates) and cultural (Hofstede’s cultural dimensions) predictors of this trend.

Methods:

We leveraged an NSF-funded 12-billion-word online-media database, with over 30 million newspaper and magazine articles taken from over 7,000 sites across 20 countries, and identified six synonyms of ‘Asian’ that are related to the coronavirus. We compiled their most frequently used descriptors (collocates) from October 2019 to May 2020 across 20 countries, culminating in 85,827 collocates that were rated by two independent researchers to provide a Cumulative Asian Sentiment Score (CASS) per month. This allowed us to track statistically significant shifts in societal sentiments toward Asians from a baseline period (Oct’19-Dec’19) to the onset of the pandemic (Jan’20-May’20). We tested competing predictors of this trend: Pandemic variables of incidence and mortality rates measured monthly for all 20 countries taken from the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker, and Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions of Individualism, Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance and Masculinity for the 20 countries.

Results:

Before the pandemic in December’19, Jamaica and New Zealand evidenced the most negative societal sentiments toward Asians; when news of the coronavirus broke in January’20, the U.S. and Nigeria evidenced the most negative sentiments toward Asians among 20 countries. Globally, sentiments of Asians became more negative—a statistically significant linear decline during the Covid-19 pandemic. CASS trended neutral before the pandemic during the baseline period of October’19 to November’19, then dived in February’20. CASS were, ironically, not predicted by Covid-19’s incidence and mortality rates, but by Hofstede’s cultural dimensions: individualism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance—as shown by mixed models (N = 28,494).

Conclusions:

Racism, in the form of Anti-Asian sentiments, are deep-seated, and predicated on structural undercurrents of culture—across 20 countries. The Covid-19 pandemic may have indirectly (and inadvertently) exacerbated societal tendencies for racism. Our study lays the important groundwork to design interventions and policy communications to ameliorate Anti-Asian racism that are culturally nuanced and contextually appropriate.