ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
From Perceived Risk to Action: An Individual-Level Study of How Self-Determination and New Media Shape Public Emergency Rescue Participation in China
Provisionally accepted
- Shaanxi Police College, Xian, China
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Grounded in Self-Determination Theory (SDT), this study investigates the underlying mechanisms influencing individuals' willingness to join grassroots emergency rescue teams. A three-dimensional integrative model—comprising psychological motivation, risk perception, and behavioral intention— is developed. Based on 428 valid survey responses and analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), the results reveal that collective protective consciousness, social belongingness, and emergency response self-efficacy all exert significant negative effects on personal emergency risk perception, which in turn significantly reduces individuals' willingness to participate in emergency rescue. Furthermore, personal emergency risk perception partially mediates the relationships between the three psychological factors and participation willingness, indicating its role in transforming external contexts into intrinsic motivation. Additionally, the new media engagement effect moderates the link between risk perception and behavioral intention, with higher levels of engagement mitigating the inhibitory impact of risk on willingness to act. This study extends the application of SDT within the context of disaster volunteerism and offers a theoretical lens for both volunteer mobilization strategies and behavioral prediction in emergency response settings.As a primary goal, the abstract should render the general significance and conceptual advance of the work clearly accessible to a broad readership. References should not be cited in the abstract. Leave the Abstract empty if your article does not require one – please see the "Article types" on every Frontiers journal page for full details.
Keywords: self-determination theory, Personal Emergency Risk Perception, CollectiveProtective Consciousness, Social belongingness, New Media Engagement Effect
Received: 12 Jun 2025; Accepted: 14 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 ZHANG. 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: RUNHAN ZHANG, 179513127@qq.com
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