Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis which has witnessed consumers experiencing significant anxiety provoked by the threats to their health and even lives. Meanwhile, consumers have been observed to make more ethical purchases since the start of the pandemic. Drawing on literature on terror management and negotiable fate, this research employs a moderated moderating model to investigate how consumers’ perception of the pandemic severity leads to ethical consumption as a defensive mechanism against death-related anxiety, as well as the differential role of consumers’ belief in negotiable fate in moderating this pandemic impact across tight and loose cultures. We conducted two cross-cultural studies with 592 and 423 respondents, respectively, at different times during the pandemic. Results consistently show that perceived pandemic severity increases consumers’ intention to consume ethically. Consumers’ belief in negotiable fate directly enhances ethical consumption, but it alleviates the effect of pandemic severity on ethical consumption among consumers who live in a tight culture. Our findings reveal the existential meaning of ethical consumption as a buffer against pandemic-triggered mortality salience, identify the positive psychological functions of negotiable fate in promoting ethical consumption but mitigating consumers’ need to buffer death-related concerns, and advances the importance of investigating the cultural variances in the terror management process toward ethical consumption. The findings offer insights for marketers and policy makers to develop effective strategies to support consumers’ ethical coping during societal crises.