Covid-19 and Climate change: An Application of Protection Motivation Theory on how Competing Threats are Evaluated

Abstract

Research within the field of threat evaluation has investigated several aspects of how individuals evaluate and choose to cope with a threat, resulting in useful findings for the field of research. However, there is limited research about how individuals evaluate two competing threats. This thesis attempts to investigate the literature gap by applying the framework of the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) to address how individuals deal with Covid-19 and Climate change as competing threats. Furthermore, we will also investigate whether conflicting information might impact the evaluation of the threats. Through a survey-based experiment, (N = 93) participants were divided into three groups, where two groups were exposed to a manipulation of conflicting information. Findings shows that most individuals evaluated Covid-19 as the bigger threat. Results also indicated that the use of PMT framework on how a single threat is evaluated, is applicable for evaluating two competing threats. Furthermore, we found that most individuals perceive that there is a conflict of the perceived effectiveness for the preventive measures, depending on which threat the measure is supposed to prevent. However, findings for self-efficacy revealed that individuals do not see a conflict of whether a preventive measure is easy or difficult to perform depending on which threat it is supposed to prevent, which goes against expected results. Similarly, were we not able to conclude whether conflicting information might impact the evaluation as our manipulation had no effect on individuals threat valuation. Nevertheless, the findings might be useful as inspiration for future research.