Fear, Not Anxiety, Fuels Panic Buying — But Only When We Think Concretely, Study Finds

When supermarket shelves empty out during a crisis, the popular explanation is simple: people are scared. But new experimental research suggests that the story is considerably more nuanced — and that the kind of fear, and the way our minds process threatening information, may determine who rushes to stockpile and who stays calm. In a pair of experiments spanning two very different crises, researchers found that panic buying intentions rose most sharply when people were primed with fear rather than anxiety, but only when they were thinking in concrete, detail-oriented terms. Strikingly, this pattern was stronger among men than women, a result that challenges common assumptions about gender and crisis behavior.

The study, published in the journal Current Psychology, was conducted by Marketa Lepicovsky of the Higher Colleges of Technology in Abu Dhabi, Jamel Khenfer of Zayed University, and Yi-Tai Seih of the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. The team set out to address a persistent gap in the panic buying literature: most prior work has been correlational, surveying people after the fact about their stockpiling habits during events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Such designs can reveal associations but cannot establish what causes what. By experimentally manipulating both the emotional framing of threat information and participants’ mode of thinking, the researchers were able to isolate the psychological conditions under which fear translates into the urge to hoard.

Central to the research is a distinction that psychologists have drawn increasingly sharply in recent years: the difference between fear and anxiety. Although the two words are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, they describe different emotional states with different cognitive signatures. Fear, in the classical account, is a response to a specific, identifiable, and present danger — a predator, an oncoming car, a virus sweeping through your city. Anxiety, by contrast, is triggered by uncertain, diffuse, or potential threats — the worry about what might happen. Neuroscience work by Joseph LeDoux and Daniel Pine has even proposed that the two states rely on partly separable brain systems. Crucially for this study, prior research by Lidewij Mayiwar and Fredrik Björklund found that fear and anxiety also differ in what psychologists call construal level: fear tends to accompany concrete, low-level thinking about specifics, while anxiety aligns with abstract, high-level processing of broader meaning.

That alignment is where construal level theory enters the picture. Developed by Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman, the theory holds that people mentally represent the same object or event at different levels of abstraction depending on psychological distance. A distant, hypothetical threat is typically processed abstractly — in terms of its general meaning and far-reaching implications — while an immediate, proximal threat is processed concretely, in terms of tangible, here-and-now details. The researchers reasoned that these processing modes would interact with emotional framing. Fear-framed messages, they hypothesized, would be especially likely to provoke self-protective responses like panic buying when recipients were also engaged in concrete thinking, because both the emotion and the cognitive mode converge on immediate, specific action.

To test this idea, the team ran two experiments with a 2×2 design. In Study 1, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, participants were randomly assigned to write about managing either fear or anxiety related to the pandemic, and to do so in either a concrete or an abstract way. Those in the concrete conditions were asked to write about the specific actions and steps they would take; those in the abstract conditions were asked to write about reasons and overall benefits. The manipulation drew on established methods for shifting construal level, and its affective effectiveness was verified using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a text-analysis tool. Participants in the threat conditions used significantly more negative emotion words than those in a control condition, confirming that the writing task genuinely evoked distress. Panic buying intention was then measured with a seven-item scale adapted from work by Sérgio Lins and colleagues.

The results of Study 1 provided initial evidence for a three-way interaction between affective framing, construal level, and gender. Fear-framed information, compared with anxiety-framed information, tended to be associated with higher panic buying intention — but predominantly under low construal level, that is, when participants were processing information concretely. And this combined effect was more pronounced among men. The finding runs counter to a large body of literature documenting that women typically report higher levels of fear and anxiety than men, and that anxiety disorders are roughly twice as common in women. It also complicates evolutionary accounts, such as that of Joyce Benenson and colleagues, which frame self-protection as a distinctly adaptive female strategy. Whatever the ultimate explanation, the data suggest that when fear and concrete thinking are experimentally combined, men’s stockpiling intentions respond more strongly.

Study 2 extended the paradigm to a very different kind of threat: economic inflation driven by tariffs, described to participants in a news-report format. The same 2×2 manipulation of emotion (fear versus anxiety) and construal level (concrete versus abstract) was applied, this time framed around economic fear and economic anxiety. The pattern of results replicated the first study: fear-framed information again tended to produce higher panic buying intention than anxiety-framed information under concrete processing, with the effect again more visible among men. The replication across a health crisis and an economic crisis is significant, because it suggests the mechanism is not specific to pandemics but reflects a general feature of how threat information is emotionally and cognitively processed.

Study 2 also probed the mechanism behind these effects, drawing on protection motivation theory. This framework, originally formulated by Ronald Rogers and later consolidated in a meta-analysis by Deborah Floyd and colleagues, holds that responses to threat appeals depend on cognitive appraisals — including perceived threat severity, or how serious and significant a person judges the danger to be. The researchers measured perceived threat severity with items asking participants how serious, severe, and significant they considered the situation in the scenario to be. Their analysis suggested that perceived severity may help account for the observed responses, pointing to a plausible pathway: fear-framed, concretely processed information makes a threat feel more severe, and that heightened appraisal of severity feeds the impulse to buy in bulk as a form of self-protection.

The theoretical framing of the study matters for interpreting why fear should outperform anxiety in driving stockpiling. Fear is an action-oriented emotion — it demands immediate defensive responses to a concrete danger. Anxiety, as scholars such as Maria Miceli and Cristiano Castelfranchi have argued, is fundamentally an epistemic emotion, born of uncertainty and directed at resolving ambiguity rather than acting against a known threat. When a crisis message frames the threat in fear terms and the recipient is already processing concretely, the emotional and cognitive systems align toward immediate, tangible defensive action — and buying more than one needs becomes a readily available way to feel safe. Anxiety-framed messages, or abstract processing of threat, may instead direct attention to broad meanings and long-range implications, diluting the urgency of the shopping cart.

The practical implications reach directly into crisis communication and public policy. Governments and retailers routinely face the challenge of conveying urgency — the need for caution, preparedness, or vaccination — without triggering the very panic they hope to prevent. These findings suggest that the wording and framing of crisis messages interact with how audiences mentally represent the threat. Communication that induces fear while inviting concrete, step-by-step processing may inadvertently push people toward stockpiling behavior; conversely, framing that encourages abstract reflection on the broader situation, or that pairs urgent information with abstract framing, may reduce the hoarding impulse. As the authors note, understanding these conditional effects is essential for designing interventions that keep supply chains stable and shelves stocked the next time a crisis arrives.

Subject of Research: How fear versus anxiety framing, construal level, and gender shape panic buying intentions under threat, tested in two experiments during the COVID-19 pandemic and an inflation crisis.

Article Title: Fear, construal level, and gender in panic buying under threat: evidence from two experiments

Article References: Fear, construal level, and gender in panic buying under threat: evidence from two experiments. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10178-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10178-6

Keywords: panic buying, fear, anxiety, construal level theory, protection motivation theory, gender differences, crisis communication, consumer behavior, threat perception, COVID-19, inflation, experimental psychology