Putting your money where your mouth is: Expressions of Chinese nationalist sentiments are not just cheap talk

Do nationalist expressions reflect a willingness to pay costs or are they cheap talk? This is important because theories expect nationalism affects a wide range of outcomes that pose costs to participants, including international conflict and participation in boycotts. However, past research has either relied on self‐reports that cannot rule out cheap talk or outcome measures at higher levels of analysis, such as international trade flows, that do not directly link individual‐level nationalist sentiment to behavior. In contrast, we measure both nationalist sentiments and costly behavior on an individual level using the content of millions of Chinese social media posts and the nationality of the brand of users' devices, for example type of cellphone, as a costly behavioral measure. We find that nationalist sentiment makes citizens less likely to use US and Japanese brands with an instrumental variable analysis.