1. please read below article and vividly write a RESEARCH CONTENT Unusual purchasing behavior during the early stages of

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1. please read below article and vividly write a RESEARCH CONTENT
Unusual purchasing behavior during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic: The stimulus-organism-response approach
Samuli Laatoa, A.K.M. Najmul Islama,e, Ali Farooqa, Amandeep Dhirb,c,d,*
a Department of Future Technologies, University of Turku, Finland
b Norwegian School of Hotel Management, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway c Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, Finland
d Optentia Research Focus Area, North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa
e LUT School of Engineering Science, LUT University, Lappeenranta, Finland
ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 pandemic, unusual consumer behavior, such as hoarding toilet paper, was reported globally. We investigated this behavior when fears of consumer market disruptions started circulating, to capture human behavior in this unique situation. Based on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework, we propose a structural model connecting exposure to online information sources (environmental stimuli) to two behavioral responses: unusual purchases and voluntary self-isolation. To test the proposed model, we collected data from 211 Finnish respondents via an online survey, and carried out analysis using PLS-SEM. We found a strong link between self-intention to self-isolate and intention to make unusual purchases, providing empirical evidence that the reported consumer behavior was directly linked to anticipated time spent in self-isolation. The results further revealed exposure to online information sources led to increased information overload and cyberchondria. Information overload was also a strong predictor of cyberchondria. Perceived severity of the situation and cyberchondria had significant impacts on people’s intention to make unusual purchases and voluntarily self-isolate. Future research is needed to confirm the long-term effects of the pandemic on consumer and retail services.
Introduction
Unusual retail consumer behavior, such as hoarding toilet paper and food, was reported all over the world during March 2020 when the COVID-19 virus escalated into a pandemic (Miri et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020). The presumed cause was not only the looming health threat of COVID-19 and possible risk of being quarantined, but also fears of the disease causing factories to halt production and a global disruption of supply chains. Retail and consumer services suffered from this unusual situation in several ways. The initial rush for certain items caused shelves to empty, while a surplus was created for others. Google’s (2020) COVID-19 community mobility report showed that access to retail and recreational services decreased considerably all over the world due to the pandemic after March 2020. The changes in consumer behavior impacted not only grocery stores, convenient stores, cafeterias, and restaurants but also their suppliers. It is important for at least three reasons for retail and consumer services to understand the underlying
processes and reasons that led to the reported unusual behavior: first, to be able to better react to similar situations in the future; second, to help the currently suffering retail and consumer services to deal with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic; and third, to provide knowledge for an optimal transition to the new status quo of consumer and retail services that is expected to emerge once the COVID-19 pandemic is curbed.
Previous research on behavior during outbreaks and pandemics linked behavioral change as an outcome of individual-level motivations and government-enforced policies (Wen et al., 2005). Individual- and government-level decision making is prone to errors and biases in new and unclear situations (Weinstein, 1988). The greater the novelty, unpredictability, and ambiguity, the safer the actions individuals take (Brug et al., 2009). Thus, information sources have played a major role in consumer behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic (Laato et al., 2020). Accordingly, the aim of this study is to understand the role of information in consumer behavior during unprecedented situations on a global scale that contain a looming threat of halted factory production
services.
* Corresponding author. Norwegian School of Hotel Management, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S. Laato), [email protected] (A.K.M.N. Islam), [email protected] (A. Farooq), [email protected] (A. Dhir).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2020.102224
Received 30 March 2020; Received in revised form 8 July 2020; Accepted 8 July 2020
Available online 21 July 2020
0969-6989/© 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
S. Laato et al.
and disrupted supply chains. In doing so, we address the following gaps in previous work. First, although studies have been conducted on local catastrophes and epidemics, a pandemic of the magnitude and economic impact of COVID-19 has not been seen in a century. These studies focused primarily on individuals’ protection motivation and health measures (Gamma et al., 2017; Rubin et al., 2009; Seale et al., 2009; Timpka et al., 2014) rather than consumer behavior. Furthermore, previous literature did not examine exhaustively how online informa- tion sources affect behavioral change during a pandemic. The context of the COVID-19 pandemic allows us to investigate how people behave during a serious global pandemic when information concerning it is being broadcast through various online media.
For addressing the research gaps above, we adapted the stimulus- organism-response (S-O-R) framework (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974) and propose two dependent variables: unusual purchasing and volun- tary self-isolation. We used the S-O-R framework to investigate how the environmental stimuli of online information sources on COVID-19 ulti- mately led to these behaviors. We tested the model with data collected from university employees and students in Finland during March 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic was escalating in several European countries, and information regarding it was bombarded to consumers through all news channels and social media.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. First, we review the existing literature on human behavior during unusual global circum- stances such as pandemics. Next, we present the research context and related theories. We then use the theories to build hypotheses and a research model, after which we report our data collection methods and results. We conclude this work with practical and theoretical implica- tions, limitations, and future work.
2. Background
2.1. Pandemics and behavioral change
There have been several epidemic outbreaks in recent world history, for example, Ebola, SARS, MERS, swine flu, and dengue fever (Balinska and Rizzo, 2009). Most prominently, the outbreaks have had an impact on two categories of human behavior: consumer behavior (Miri et al., 2020) and health risk mitigation behavior (La Torre, 2019). In addition, severe macroeconomic implications typically follow in areas hit by a pandemic causing unemployment, uncertainty, and an economic recession.
Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services 57 (2020) 102224
One model used in pandemic literature to explain behavior is the RANAS model. This model was developed to systematically understand health-related behavior by taking risks, attitudes, norms, abilities, and self-regulation into consideration (Mosler, 2012). The model has been applied to understand behavior during pandemics. Social norms, perceived severity, response beliefs, and health knowledge predict adoption of individual prevention measures (Gamma et al., 2017, 2020). In addition to the health measures mentioned, outbreaks and pandemics are expected to have a significant impact on consumer behavior. Scholars have reported increases in purchasing of food, face masks, hand sanitizer, and other items perceived to be important for surviving the pandemic (Goodwin et al., 2019). In addition to RANAS, the protection-motivation theory (PMT) has been employed for under- standing the underlying motives of human action during epidemic sit- uations (Farooq et al., 2020; Laato et al., 2020a; Sharifirad et al., 2014; Timpka et al., 2014). The findings of work using PMT emphasized the impact of an individual’s threat and coping appraisal on behavioral in- tentions (Timpka et al., 2014), which calls for research on the factors influencing these appraisals.
Selected literature on the impact of epidemics on human behavior is summarized in Table 1. Previous researchers focused heavily on pre- ventive health behavior, and consumer behavior has received less attention. Furthermore, the theoretical foundations of the studies have been limited, making it difficult to generalize and expand the findings to other contexts. Finally, as the COVID-19 pandemic situation is unprec- edented and unique, it allows us to gain insight into human behavior during a global pandemic event of massive scale where individuals have considerable uncertainty about how to act with no clear point of refer- ence. For taking the consumer side into account, one successful and robust framework is the S-O-R (Sherman et al., 1997). We propose that combining the viewpoint of S-O-R with existing theoretical lenses typi- cally used to understand human behavior during pandemics, such as PMT (Rogers, 1975), would offer insight into how environmental stimuli related to the pandemic leads to unusual purchasing.
2.2. The COVID-19 pandemic and the public response
By 2007, more than 36 coronaviruses were known, and among them, SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV) was the most researched, with more 4000 studies conducted on it (Cheng et al., 2007). Researchers found horse- shoe bats are a natural source of SARS-CoV, whereas civets act as the intermediary amplification host. Cheng et al. (2007) argued that the tendency to keep these animals near each other is a time bomb, and the reemergence of a coronavirus is inevitable. However, it took roughly 18 years from the emergence of SARS until the current coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 causing a respiratory disease called COVID-19 was detected and started to spread among humans.
In December 2019, the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 causing the COVID-19 disease that involves mild to severe respiratory symptoms surfaced in Wuhan, China (Xu et al., 2020). Although COVID-19 is an acute resolved disease, it can be lethal, with current death rate estimates ranging from 0.4% to 3% of those infected (Xu et al., 2020). Compared to the previous coronavirus-caused disease SARS, COVID-19 has a significantly greater reproductive number (Liu et al., 2020). Its capa- bility to spread rapidly and infect led to a global outbreak in early 2020, which escalated to the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. SARS, a previous in- fectious coronavirus disease, caused 8098 reported human infections and 774 deaths in 32 countries during the years it was active (McAleer, 2020). In contrast, as of March 27, there were 465,915 confirmed COVID-19 cases in 199 different countries or territories, with 21,031 direct deaths caused by the virus. On May 16, there were 4.3 million confirmed cases and more than 79,000 deaths (WHO, 2020). In addition to the origin country China, massive outbreaks have been reported, for example, in the United States, Italy, Iran, Spain, France, and Germany (WHO, 2020).
Governments, stock markets, and consumers reacted quickly to the virus. Almost all countries hit by the virus issued restrictions on move- ment, placing people in quarantine, closing public services such as schools, canceling and banning large public gatherings, etc. (Anderson et al., 2020; Farooq et al., 2020). These actions radically altered the status quo of society, even in countries and areas where the COVID-19 pandemic was not yet acute, as governments took proactive measures to minimize the anticipated damage (Stoecklin, 2020). The country in which we collected data from at the time had fewer than 1000 confirmed cases of The aspect of environmental response in S-O-R regarding informa- tion overload can be understood through CLT, which deals with how the human brain processes new information (Sweller, 2011). CLT is based on the presumption that humans have limited cognitive capacity. The situation when this capacity is exceeded is called cognitive overload, and it invokes a stress response in humans to take a step backward to a safer, less demanding situation. Accordingly, researchers have used CLT to explain a wide variety of phenomena that require cognitive process- ing and conceptualization of situations; for example, why people suffer from information and communication overload (Dhir et al., 2018, 2019; Malik et al., 2020; Whelan et al., 2020a). The quality of the news, in- formation, and communication regarding COVID-19 plays an important role in individuals’ decision making and behavior (Laato et al., 2020). CLT postulates that if the cognitive capacity to process the information is overloaded, then the behavioral response (of the organism) can be adversely affected (Sweller, 2011), contributing to the possibility of ir- rational action. An individual’s previous knowledge, thinking skills, and self-efficacy have moderating effects on the behavioral response (Attiq et al., 2017). Although the environment ultimately pushes organisms toward certain reactions, individual and group characteristics may act as an opposing or amplifying force.
In addition to CLT, we use PMT to support the S-O-R framework, which explains the factors affecting motivation to take steps against imminent health threats (Rogers, 1975). The theory suggests that motivation to adopt protective measures, such as self-isolation, is a result of personal threat and coping appraisal. Threat appraisal typically constitutes perceived severity and susceptibility. Perceived severity re- fers to the seriousness of the overall situation, as the name implies. Perceived susceptibility or vulnerability refers to how likely individuals perceive themselves to be at risk. The coping appraisal is the personal estimate of an individual’s ability to cope with the situation (Brug et al., 2009). It is typically seen to constitute self-efficacy, response efficacy, and response costs. This means that scholars have often used self-efficacy literature in PMT research to understand the effect of threat and coping appraisal on the adoption of protective health measures (Maddux and Rogers, 1983). Accordingly, PMT has been employed in different contexts to understand users’ motivation, for example, health-related behaviors (Milne et al., 2000) and pro-environmental behavior (Kothe et al., 2019), among others.
For the research model, we adopted the perceived severity and self- efficacy constructs from PMT to capture individuals’ threat and coping appraisal during COVID-19. We adopted information overload from CLT to capture the cognitive load that the abundance of available COVID-19 information causes individuals. As we looked at the effects of online information sources on behavior, we also adopted the cyberchondria construct (Joki�c-Begi�c et al., 2019) to describe the health anxiety that may arise from COVID-19. Using the S-O-R framework (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974), we placed online exposure to online information sources as the environmental stimuli, information overload as the organism, and two psychological responses (cyberchondria and perceived severity) and two behavioral responses (intention to make unusual purchases COVID-19. However, news and information about the virus were freely and widely available, and the government had issued movement and social meeting restrictions to combat the disease. Thus, this study focused on a country impacted by fear of COVID-19 and related disruptions, causing proactive measures to emerge on govern- ment and individual levels.