Whether it is the global financial crisis, climate change, or the COVID-19 pandemic, crises have a significant impact on human well-being and can have far-reaching consequences for individuals, countries, and the economy. Most previous research on global crisis, however, has primarily focused on macro-level indicators of these effects (e.g., economic indices, GDP, CO2 emissions) at the expense of investigating their micro-level determinants, such as citizens’ beliefs about the cause and handling of a crisis and their psychological reactions to it.
A primary consideration in causal attributions of blame for high local impact is whether the crisis could have been prevented or mitigated in a superior way by the institution responsible for it. This is especially important in a global crisis because it requires regulatory efforts that transcend a nation’s borders and require nonhierarchical collaboration with institutions outside the state (Findlay 2013).
The present study suggests that individuals in countries where the COVID-19 pandemic has had a more severe local impact tend to blame both national and international institutions more than individuals in countries where the pandemic has been less severe. This is largely because consumers perceive that the cause of the higher local impact lies primarily in the incompetence of their national institutions, but also in some cases in the failure of the international organizations to prevent or handle the crisis effectively. As a result, businesses with products that have a direct link to the crisis should consider taking action to build trust by demonstrating their engagement in crisis resolution at the national level, e.g., by disseminating expert knowledge to areas that have limited resources and communicating with national governments about their contributions to crisis resolution.