TY - JOUR
T1 - The curve not taken
T2 - Effects of COVID-19 international comparison news
AU - Kim, Seon Woo
AU - Santia, Martina
AU - Pingree, Raymond J.
AU - Oden, Ayla
AU - Bryanov, Kirill
AU - Wyers, Jessica
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Kim et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2022/8
Y1 - 2022/8
N2 - International news can inform people not only about what is happening in other countries, but also about how their own country could benefit from policies that have proved successful elsewhere. Specifically, international policy comparison news, or news that compares the policies of two or more countries on the same issue, is a potentially important but underutilized and understudied form of news content. We use an experiment to test effects of exposure to news comparing the COVID-19 pandemic policies of the U.S. versus South Korea, and find that this increases knowledge of policy differences between the two countries, support for adopting similar policies in the U.S., presidential blame for the severity of the pandemic in the U.S., and trust in health experts. On most outcomes, these effects did not vary across political party lines, a particularly encouraging result given the polarized nature of policy debates on this issue.
AB - International news can inform people not only about what is happening in other countries, but also about how their own country could benefit from policies that have proved successful elsewhere. Specifically, international policy comparison news, or news that compares the policies of two or more countries on the same issue, is a potentially important but underutilized and understudied form of news content. We use an experiment to test effects of exposure to news comparing the COVID-19 pandemic policies of the U.S. versus South Korea, and find that this increases knowledge of policy differences between the two countries, support for adopting similar policies in the U.S., presidential blame for the severity of the pandemic in the U.S., and trust in health experts. On most outcomes, these effects did not vary across political party lines, a particularly encouraging result given the polarized nature of policy debates on this issue.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0271041
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0271041
M3 - Article
C2 - 35952342
AN - SCOPUS:85136340907
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 17
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 8 August
M1 - e0271041
ER -