Does mislabeling COVID-19 elicit the perception of threat and reduce blame?

Associating a life-threatening crisis with geographic locality can stigmatize people from that area. However, such strategy may reduce the public blame attributed to government because perceived foreign threat establishes scapegoat, which transfers blame. In context of COVID-19 pandemic, we investigated whether “Chinese Virus” label placed on has elicited opposition Chinese immigrants and reduced federal government. We used survey experiment during list measure threat. The descriptive analysis suggested negative attitude toward overall, in conservatives expressed stronger attitudes than did liberals moderates. While labelling as not make difference our exploratory results shows it led significant increase liberals’ perception are showed no effect overall reducing extent either or conservatives’