Abstract
In the environment of COVID-19, people are faced with mortality salience (MS) and socioeconomic crisis. According to the terror management theory, the MS would lead to particular consumption attitudes and behaviors caused by the self-esteem and cultural worldview defense. The creativity as a potential value of products needs to be examined to explore how the MS changed the creativity evaluation of three types of products categorized into normal, renovative, and innovative products, based on the degree of originality (Zhang et al., 2019). Two experiments were conducted to examine (1) the MS effect on the creativity and purchase intention evaluation and (2) both MS and country-of-origin effect on the evaluations. The results show that usefulness and purchase intention are affected by both effects, and the novelty is mainly affected by MS.
Highlights
In the COVID-19 pandemic, people face the risk of infection, the pain of illness, and the threat of death anytime
A 2 × 3 analyses of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to examine the differences in the evaluation scores between pre-test and post-test ( M = Mpost − Mpre) to see if they were affected by two different manipulations or the product category
According to results in Experiment 1, the purchase intention of normal products significantly increased after mortality salience (MS)
Summary
In the COVID-19 pandemic, people face the risk of infection, the pain of illness, and the threat of death anytime. People who lack meaning in life would be more prone to lead to death anxiety and activate terror management after MS manipulation (Routledge and Juhl, 2010). Thereby, they would positively evaluate the in-group members and more negatively on outgroupers (Greenberg et al, 1990) to achieve a sense of meaning in life. People attempt to gain an insight into symbolic immortality through a meaningful life and bolster self-esteem through aligning well with the value prescribed by the worldview (Elad-Strenger, 2016)
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