Naming to agree in a time of pandemic

By Alistair Jones

SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer – What’s in a name? A popular notion is that giving something a name makes it real – and you can then communicate about it.

But as soon as you label something it affects how people perceive it. And words carry hidden baggage that may play at least some role in shaping thought and subsequent behaviour.

The psychological effect of naming is very much an open topic for research and it has caught the attention of Theodore C. Masters-Waage and Nilotpal Jha, two PhD students at Singapore Management University (SMU).

Under the supervision of Jochen Reb, an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources at SMU, the doctoral candidates began investigating the impact of naming against the backdrop of the current COVID-19 pandemic.

“We started this project when the virus first broke out,” explains Masters-Waage. “It became like an experiment was already being run, where you were seeing some people saying Wuhan virus, other people were saying COVID-19, and other people were saying coronavirus.”

The World Health Organisation (WHO) advises against location-specific names for infectious diseases – such as Spanish flu, or Middle East respiratory syndrome – believing it can lead to stigmatisation of individuals associated with the locations.

But by the time the WHO had settled on COVID-19 as the preferred name for the disease, the term Wuhan virus – derived from the likely emergence of the virus in that Chinese city – was already “floating around in news and on social media”, says Jha.

“There were reported incidences of Sinophobia (xenophobia against Chinese) in numerous Western countries including Australia, the UK, the US and Italy. Through this research, we first wanted to gather empirical support to see if naming [the disease the Wuhan virus] indeed leads to such stigmatisation,” he explains.

Intuitive but empirically unsupported

Attempting to measure for a possible Sinophobic response presented a challenge for the researchers.

“First of all, the problem is that all the research that people do on psychology is often in the U.S., or at least in the West, such as Europe, so the stereotypes and racial issues are often either American or European-centric,” says Masters-Waage.

“If you look for scales on stereotyping of African-American individuals, there are lots and lots of scales. But if you look for something on Sinophobia – we couldn't really find anything.”

Adds Jha: “So we used a self-reported measure used in past research to measure prejudice against people of colour. The questions were modified to ask respondents about their warmth, admiration and sympathy towards Chinese people.”

For their data, the researchers collected samples from the U.S., Canada and India, recruited through the online surveying platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk. A demographic breakdown across the total sample of 504 shows a mean age of 36.09, with 29.96 percent female, 43.06 percent Caucasian and 38.69 percent Indian.

Participants were generally well educated, with 52.18 percent having an undergraduate degree, 33.73 percent holding a higher qualification and 14.09 percent with a lower qualification.

They were asked to read an article describing the spread of the pandemic and then answer questions relating to state anxiety, domain-specific risk aversion, beliefs about contagiousness and mortality of the virus, and attitudes towards Chinese individuals. The process was repeated for each of the three virus names.

The headline finding was that there was no evidence of naming having a significant effect on Sinophobia. This null effect was robust across different political orientations, education levels and gender.

Masters-Waage admits he was “a little bit surprised”, given the finding is counter to the narrative favoured by the WHO, among others.

“But we didn't even see it in the U.S. sample, or even in political orientation; there was really no effect on Sinophobia,” he says.

Adds Jha: “Though our findings are only initial, they indicate that organisations are relying on this intuitive but empirically unsupported claim that location-specific names lead to stigmatisation.”

Beliefs about the virus

The second part of the study investigated whether using a scientific name – COVID-19 – has had a negative effect on attitudes towards the virus and whether this naming effect was dependent on individual differences.

The researchers found marginal evidence that COVID-19 was perceived as being more contagious than Wuhan virus and this effect was moderated by education levels, with the most highly educated subgroup seeing the virus as most contagious. Similarly, differences in beliefs about the mortality rate saw higher projections according to education level.

“What we saw is that no one is good at actually guessing the mortality rate. Everyone was over-estimating it,” Masters-Waage says.

There were many and varied interaction effects across the subgroups on beliefs about the virus according to how it was named. For example, differences were seen for COVID-19 across education levels, for coronavirus across political orientation, and for Wuhan virus across genders.

“I didn't actually see a great pattern in why the different subgroups were perceiving [things differently with the] different names, but it was evident that they were. That was quite consistent,” says Masters-Waage.

The research findings do not indicate that one name is favourable to another but the evidence does underline the irrationalities by which names are processed and that it could indicate a public health message: Choose one name and stick to it.

“The irony is that we are so focused on getting the right name that maybe we create many more names than we need. There are now four names for this virus because there is now also SARS-CoV-2. Let's worry less about getting it right, let's just have something we can all [agree on],” says Masters-Waage.

The researchers pre-registered their project and posted their data and analysis on the Open Science Framework, a free online platform at the non-profit Centre for Open Science in the US.

“It means that you can just go up on Open Science and see the study, see how we measured things, see what analyses we did, depending on people's level of interest,” Masters-Waage says.

“I think there's a big move towards this type of open science in the whole scientific community, particularly in psychology and also in organisational behaviour.”

The co-authors would like to thank the members of the Mindfulness, Attention and Decision-Making Lab at SMU, including Amos Tai, Brian Tan Yeow Wee, Hong Xuan Tan, Megan Choy, Thanh Tuyen Ngyuen Tran and Vanice Chow. The lab is directed by SMU Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour & Human Resources Jochen Reb.

Back to Research@SMU Aug 2020 Issue