Religiosity, divine control and consumer resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic

By way of a cross-sectional survey (n = 524), this study demonstrates that religiosity positively influenced consumers’ willingness to use face-to-face services under very different, disruptive, and risky conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moderated mediation analysis shows this relationship was mediated by beliefs in divine control and moderated by ethnicity. The findings establish intrinsic religiosity as a key predictor of adaptive consumer behaviour that was critical to promoting much-needed socio-economic support during the ongoing disruption of the pandemic. They provide an explanation at the individual level, grounded in concepts of consumer resilience, of why religiosity has previously been linked to socio-economic recovery following the pandemic, and reveal the important influence of intrinsic religiosity on consumer adaptation and behaviour during times of major socio-economic disruption.