The Impact Mechanism Of Government Information Release On Negativity Bia

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019,the government faces the challenge of both an "offline epidemic" and an "Infodemic".How to deal with the storm of public opinion brought by negative information in the context of "Infodemic" has become one of the difficulties for the government to manage the epidemic.Negative bias is a pervasive psychological pattern in human decision-making that refers to people’s innate ability to capture attention,process information,and experience stronger emotions in response to negative entities(e.g.,events,objects).In the context of the strong negativity of NCCP,the negative bias in social opinion is even stronger.The government needs to take effective measures to influence the negative bias psychologically in public opinion,starting from information dissemination.The serial position effect that individuals remember information at different locations more or less effectively,as an important pattern in human cognitive processing,may provide a boost to the improvement of information release plans.This study takes the text of the epidemic notification published on the website of the National Health Commission as an example,and examines the negative bias in the content and dissemination of the epidemic notification by dividing the text stages,and improves the release scheme in an attempt to weaken the negative bias.Study 1examined the outbreak notification text itself.Study 1a applied content analysis to a total of 691 outbreak notification texts from January 11,2020,to November 20,2021,and divided four outbreak notification text phases by labeling key points of the outbreak based on text and data changes.Based on the results of Study 1a,Study 1b sampled 40 epidemic notification texts from each of the four phases and conducted text analysis using Python language,and found that their texts were generally negatively biased,with more negative information than positive information.Study 2sampled 138 university students and used a questionnaire to measure the content of people’s communication of epidemic notification messages in each stage,and designed a coding table to code the communication texts.Statistical analysis of the results revealed that individuals were more willing to disseminate first paragraph messages with negative messages,and there was a clear negative bias within the content of the communication.Study 3 modified the dissemination scheme based on the results of the previous studies by inviting 151 university students and coding the results using the same questionnaire method.The results showed that when designing an intervention plan,changing the nature and location of events in the epidemic notification text,such as adjusting more positive events within the first paragraph,can weaken the negative bias.In summary,this study compares the past literature on negative bias and government information dissemination,builds a bridge using interdisciplinary research methods in a realistic context.Taking the epidemic notification as an example,we explores the information content bias and information delivery bias in communication from both the information dissemination side and the audience side,and proposes improved dissemination solutions to provide theoretical support and suggestions for government public opinion governance.