Going through the emotions of regret and fear: Revisiting protection motivation for identity theft protection

We explore why and how individuals adaptively and maladaptively respond to the threat of identity theft. We use protection motivation theory and regret theory, shedding light on how the individual’s reflection of a future negative event, which they did nothing to prevent, would influence their current behavior. Fear appeal is experimentally manipulated to test different models of high and low threat. By comparing the impact of anticipated regret and fear on individuals’ protection motivation, we find that discrete emotions of fear and anticipated regret behave differently in increasing adaptive and reducing maladaptive responses to identity theft. Specifically, whereas fear is only effective when threat is high, anticipated regret is effective in both high and low threat conditions. Also, we find that anticipated regret has the most potent effect on increasing adaptive coping responses in a low threat model. This means that anticipated regret could be used in situations where the threat is low rather than fear. This research provides empirical evidence of conditions under which fear and regret motivate personal security protection measures, enabling practitioners to promote identity theft protection more efficiently.