Coping Efficacy, Rather than Perceived Threat Explains the Domain Specificity in Risk-Taking Behaviors in the Wake of COVID-19 Pandemic

The current study is to explore the associations between the threat to life and risk-taking behaviors across different domains under the disaster of COVID-19 pandemic, and the role of the perceived threat and coping efficacy in the associations based on PMT. This study conducted an online survey on 2983 participants from 30 provinces in China. It found that people’s risk-taking behaviors in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic could be divided into stimulating risk-taking (SRT) behaviors and instrumental risk-taking behaviors (IRT). The exposure level to the COVID-19 pandemic was negatively related to risk-taking behaviors in natural/physical, gambling, safety, moral, and reproductive domains (SRT), but not related to financial and corporation/competition domains (IRT). Two parallel routes were found in domain-specific risk-taking behaviors when people were faced with a life-threatening epidemic. Specifically, perceived threat consistently mediated the positive relationship between exposure level and risk-taking behaviors across domains. In contrast, coping efficacy mediated the negative relationship between them with negative associations with SRT behaviors but positive associations with IRT behaviors. These findings indicated that coping efficacy, rather than perceived threat is the factor that explains the people’s domain-specific risk-taking behaviors in the context of the epidemic. The study holds implications for emergency policy-making that targets disaster risk reduction by increasing the public coping efficacy, which could prevent unnecessary SRT behaviors and improve necessary IRT behaviors in business and investment for economic recoveries.