« Le » Covid-19 est-il plus grave que « la » Covid-19 ? Impact du genre grammatical attribué à la maladie sur sa perception et sur les mesures de protection prises pour s’en prémunir

Jérémy Celse, Gilles Grolleau and Sylvain Max

Revue d'économie politique, 2022, vol. 132, issue 4, 679-695

Abstract: At first glance, debates about the gender of the definite article that should precede the term Covid-19 seem to be more about grammatical and linguistic considerations. Nevertheless, following recent work (Farrow et al. [2018]) inviting a closer look at words as levers for influencing human perceptions and behaviours, we experimentally test in France whether the choice of the article to precede the term Covid-19 could have contributed to more effective public policies. The results show that this seemingly innocuous choice is not and suggest that, in the context of a strategy to combat the spread of the virus, the masculine article might have been more relevant.

Keywords: Definite article; Covid-19; grammatical gender; words; stereotypes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cairn.info/load_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=REDP_324_0679 (application/pdf)
http://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-politique-2022-4-page-679.htm (text/html)
free

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cai:repdal:redp_324_0679

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Revue d'économie politique from Dalloz
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire ().