The Effect of Spatial Stigma among Travellers from Pandemic Areas on Environmentally Responsible Behaviours
For many years,viral infections like the Middle East respiratory syndrome were commonly associated with the communities,regions,or countries where the first epidemic occurred.The Rules of Contagion,a timely book completed by Adam Kucharski,a renowned infectious disease expert,reminds us that pandemics have historically resulted in entire communities being stigmatised.History has repeated itself with the evolving pandemic affecting the world.Individuals travelling from pandemic areas('travellers'hereafter)during the ongoing pandemic are usually regarded as potential sources of infection.Consequently,members of the destination communities tend to be reluctant to accept the arrival of these travellers into their communities.These travellers thus may face discrimination and isolation as a result.The international top journal,Nature,as also placed a spotlight on the issue of the pandemic-related stigma.It called for a stop to associate a virus and the disease it causes with a specific place because the pandemic is fuelling deplorable racism.Undeniably,the rights to life and development of stigmatised groups worldwide are commonly constrained or even denied.Based on the binary of in-group favouritism and out-group derogation,the phenomenon of stigma is inevitable.In a same vein,the outbreak of COVID-19 not only has affected the sustainable development of the tourism industry,but also caused travellers(e.g.,travellers from Hubei province in the early stage of the pandemic)suffering from spatial stigma imposed by the society,which is extremely detrimental to pandemic prevention and control and even social stability.Within this concern in mind,merging the core tenets embedded in conservation of resources theory with those of cognitive appraisal theory,this paper developed a moderated serial mediation model unveiling the underlying process on how spatial stigma influences environmentally responsible behaviours.Subsequently,the role of self-concept clarity and negative emotions was included as the mediator while the role of self-verification as a moderator.A questionnaire survey(N=239)was provided to Hubei travellers in the early stage of the outbreak.Concomitantly,the softwares of Mplus and SPSS were adopted for structural equation analysis,and bootstrap analysis and latent moderation structural model analysis for empirical test,with results showing as follows.(1)Spatial stigma has a negative impact on environmentally responsible behaviours.(2)Spatial stigma indirectly influences environmentally responsible behaviours by decreasing self-concept clarity and increasing negative emotions,respectively.(3)Self-concept clarity and negative emotions jointly play a serial mediating role in the relationship between spatial stigma and environmentally responsible behaviours.(4)The serial mediating effect is moderated by self-verification.This research,building on conservation of resources theory as the theoretical basis,and cognitive appraisal theory as the logic flow,explains the psychological mechanism and boundary condition of the spatial stigma effect in a major public health crisis.This is the pioneer study to explore the issue of the spatial stigma during a major pandemic,thus not only contributing to optimising the traveller experience and promoting the sustainable development of tourism industry in the context of normalization of pandemic prevention and control,but also providing valuable strategies for Chinese government designed to address the concern of virus stigma intentionally imposed by Western countries.
spatial stigmaself-concept claritynegative emotionsenvironmentally responsible behavioursself-verificationpandemic prevention and control
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维普
