ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Media Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1479491
Internet use and livelihood risk perception: exploring the dynamic relationship and moderating factors between information dissemination and individual perception
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Business, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Region, China
- 2School of Mathematics and Statistics, Qiannan Normal College For Nationalities, Duyun, Guizhou, China
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The development of Internet has been accompanied by a range of uncertainties that propel the flow and interlacement of various risks, and the risk society has come into being. Strengthening research on public risk perception can make up for the deficiencies in traditional risk governance and push economic society towards high-quality development. This study explores the relationship and mechanism between the Internet use and public perception of livelihood risks based on the data of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) from 2014 to 2020. The results are as follows: Firstly, Internet use significantly enhances the level of public livelihood risk perception with robustness after using the instrumental variables and difference-in-differences estimation to address endogeneity as well as different methods to construct comprehensive indicators. Secondly, the amplification effect of Internet on livelihood risk perception exhibits various characteristics among different groups, which is more obvious in the middle and elder age, individuals without university degree, middle-income group as well as urban residents. Thirdly, this amplification effect takes on a decreasing change during 2014 to 2018, and experiences a temporary increase attributable to the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. But such fluctuation is moderate from a long-term perspective, reflecting the resilience of society to the impact of risk information on the Internet and the increasing adaptability of the public in the face of Internet information. Additionally, human capital and social capital play a significant role in mitigating the amplification effect of Internet on livelihood risk perception, with the moderation effects of these two types of capital demonstrating long-term stability.
Keywords: Livelihood risk perception, Internet use, Amplification effect, Human Capital, social capital, long-term impact
Received: 28 Aug 2024; Accepted: 10 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gan, Yang, Liu and Yu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Quan Yu, School of Mathematics and Statistics, Qiannan Normal College For Nationalities, Duyun, 558000, Guizhou, China
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