Making sense of the impact of COVID-19 event on college students’ online deviant behavior: does stress-is-enhancing mindset matter?

Previous research on the impact of COVID-19 has mainly focused on the coronavirus and its medical consequences. However, the psychological and behavioral consequences of the pandemic have received little empirical attention. By integrating event system theory with stressor-emotion model, we propose that COVID-19 event strength (novelty, disruption, and criticality) influences students’ COVID-19 anxiety and in turn, online deviant behavior. We also examined stress-is-enhancing mindset as the boundary condition to alleviate such harmful effects. Results from a three-wave lagged survey of college students indicated that students’ perceived COVID-19 event disruption and criticality (but not novelty) were positively related to COVID-19 anxiety, which in turn had a positive impact on online deviant behaviors. Moreover, stress-is-enhancing mindset mitigated the effects of COVID-19 event disruption and criticality (but not novelty) on anxiety and the indirect impact on online deviant behavior via anxiety. Our study underlines the value of an event-oriented theory-building approach to deeply understand online deviant behavior in COVID-19 context.