The ongoing crises and disasters, manifesting in various forms and temporalities, have contributed to increasing societal, economic, political, and personal turmoil. This has forced people to grapple with the ensuing challenges and threats they face, particularly to their existential security and continuity. As such, people have resorted to various ways to cope with these happenings to restore a sense of normalcy, often adopting maladaptive behaviours. Key to understanding how individuals navigate the compounding threats is to examine their coping mechanisms, what behaviours arise, and how that reflects on the societal level within the umbrella of terror management theory (TMT). Previous consumer research has often highlighted the maladaptive responses that emerge as an avenue to cope with transitory threats, such as natural disasters or terror events. However, while these studies addressed isolated occurrences, the current global landscape is vastly different, necessitating a deeper dive into such persistent issues despite their ebbs and flows. Through three essays, this thesis qualitatively explores how individuals respond to threats of differing temporal natures and what underlies their subsequent reactions (Essay One), investigates how prolonged threats in persistently turbulent environments shape group dynamics and biases against them (Essay Two), and further explores how these dynamics manifest among elites in such settings (Essay Three). This thesis offers several contributions. By integrating insights from adjacent literature domains, the thesis provides an understanding of how crises and disasters combined shape individuals’ reactions, thus extending previous knowledge built on reactions to isolated events. In doing so, this thesis also extends the knowledge of TMT beyond transitory mortality salience by offering a complementary lens on the role of prolonged mortality salience, which is often overlooked in previous TMT studies in favour of transitory one. Moreover, this thesis extends the applicability of TMT into a new context, namely the Global South, which is rarely investigated from this theoretical lens and is a real-life magnifying glass to all the worldwide crises co-occurring. This enables us to gain additional insights into the changing individual responses and the group dynamics in light of all the troubles and highlight some potentially positive outcomes, such as increased tolerance toward others, of TMT in such turbulent environments. Finally, this thesis conceptualises (in)conspicuous morality as a new form of (in)conspicuous consumption and an alternative status signal that emerges as a coping strategy in response to prolonged mortality salience and identifies its driving mechanisms and what it entails at the individual and group levels.
Consumers and Disasters: What We (Don’t) Know
Fawaz, R. (Author). 1 Jun 2024
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy