Reflection, resilience, rebound: Consumer coping with the pandemic

The article discusses about consumer coping with the pandemic. In the article, authors first offer a comprehensive review of COVID-19 articles published in marketing journals through the resilience lens, using the capital-based approach as a framework. Authors then introduce the nine articles in this special issue to provide a perspective on how consumers accumulate social, human, and economic capital to survive and thrive during the pandemic. Authors conclude by discussing several clusters of topics we hope future research can shed light on. Authors also call for research that documents the differential recovery and resilience paths of the groups of consumers who were particularly hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the high inflation rate, how will the financially disadvantaged consumers cope? How will they prioritize their lives? What kind of community and government resources and support should be put in place for those in the more marginalized groups of society? Which group of consumers will likely sustain a long-term negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic? (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

For whom do boundaries become restrictions? The role of political orientation.

While the global pandemic highlighted the importance of adhering to boundaries (e.g., social distancing rules), compliance with these boundary-imposing measures has been politically divided. This research proposes one reason that may underlie the observed ideological asymmetries toward COVID-19 prevention measures and boundaries in general: Conservatives and liberals may fundamentally differ in how they construe boundaries. Supporting this prediction, Studies 1a-1d and two follow-up studies (n = 3,231; Studies 1a-1c and follow-up studies: Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific users, Study 1d: U.S. students) demonstrate that identifying with political conservatism (vs. liberalism) increases the likelihood to construe boundaries as restrictions. We further show that, due to conservatives' greater preference for order, structure-related words carry a more positive connotation among conservatives versus liberals (Study 2: n = 744; MTurk users). Capitalizing on this finding, we demonstrate that linguistic framing that highlights the structure-providing function of a boundary (e.g., a social distancing sign can "structure" customer flow in a restaurant) can reduce the salience of its usual restrictive aspect and hence effectively improve conservatives' attitudes toward the boundaries (Study 3: n = 740; MTurk users). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).