Financial Threat during the Economic Crisis: Connections with the Social Representation of the Economic Crisis and the Willingness to Act

The 2008 economic crisis led numerous countries into economic hardship. Therefore, today, people feel financially threatened by this economic downturn. This threat can influence people’s willingness to act in order to cope with the economic situation. In this paper, the social representation theory helps to understand social knowledge associated with the economic crisis. The study is organized around two main objectives: (1) to compare the social representation of the economic crisis according to people’s level of financial threat, and (2) to study the mediating role of financial threat between people’s economic situations and their willingness to undertake economic actions (i.e., saving, consumption) and citizen’s activities (i.e., protests). French adults (N = 278) answered a free-association task based on the ‘economic crisis’ as the inductor, completed by financial threat, willingness to act, and a series of economic measures. First, results support the hypothesis of the existence of different social representations of the economic crisis according to the level of financial threat. Second, financial threat is also found to fully mediate the relationship between economic situation’s measures and the willingness to protest.