ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1584337
This article is part of the Research TopicSocial Psychological Perspectives on Threat: Understanding Climate, Economic, and Health ThreatsView all 6 articles
Does declining income caused by the COVID-19 pandemic affect Chinese individuals' future risky decision-making and intertemporal choices? -A Construal level perspective
Provisionally accepted
Yifei Hua*
Jiaxin Mi- China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, China
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In order to evaluate how residents choose savings and consumption behavior within the context of the income changes, which resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper constructed a conditional process model to study the impact of residents' declining income on their low risk savings behavior and advanced consumption behavior from a cognitive perspective. We found that residents with declining income preferred low risk savings and advanced consumption behavior; residents with lower incomes, whose original income was higher, were more likely to be influenced by anxiety about perceived emergency supply shortages. The moderating role of social trust emerged only after supply shortage anxiety mediated the effect, and this moderation differed significantly based on construal level. This paper explored the impact of declining income and the emotional fluctuations that resulted from the COVID-19 epidemic on the differential choice of residents' savings and consumption behavior. It can provide microeconomic guidance for similar emergencies in the future.
Keywords: Savings and consumption behavior, individual difference, conditional process model, COVID-19 pandemic, Behavioral Responses
Received: 27 Feb 2025; Accepted: 05 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hua and Mi. 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: Yifei Hua, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, China
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