131 general discussion of the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and by more restrictive containment measures implemented by the Dutch government, compared to the first time point. Thus, transilience may be subject to change, and it may be that the exposure to an increasingly more severe adversity can increase transilience. More research is needed to test whether transilience becomes higher when people are exposed to a certain adversity for longer time and when the threat of such adversity becomes more severe. Transilience is Perceived also at the Collective Level We assumed that transilience can be perceived, not only at the individual level, but also at the community level, as large-scale adversities have impacts also on communities, rather than on individuals in isolation; besides, individual efforts may not be sufficient to adapt to such collective threats (cf. Chen, 2015). Hence, in Chapter 4 we tested whether people perceive they can be transilient in the face of climate change risks as a community (i.e. collective transilience). We also tested whether a message that highlights the risks posed by climate change to the community would enhance collective transilience, compared to a message stressing that climate change poses risks to individuals and their household. This hypothesis was based on research showing that when people are reminded that they are facing a certain threat as a group (i.e. they perceive that it is “us” against the threat; Drury, 2018), they are more likely to show collective resilience and to engage in actions that serve the interests of the group (as opposed to individual interests; Drury, 2018; Drury et al., 2019; Ntontis et al., 2020). As expected, the results showed that people on average perceive collective transilience across different countries (i.e. the US and The Netherlands) that face different climate change risks (i.e., flooding in The Netherlands, wildfires in the Westcoast of the US, sea level rise on the South-East coast of the US; Clayton et al., 2016). Yet, our attempt to enhance collective transilience was unsuccessful. These results suggest that people perceive they can do more than ‘bounce back’ also as communities, across different threats. However, it may be that making people aware of climate change risks for their community is not an effective way to foster collective transilience. It should be noted, though, that we did not include a control condition, hence it may also be that the two conditions, which both made people aware of climate change risks, were too similar to find a difference. As such, more research is needed to understand which messages and interventions are effective in enhancing (collective) transilience. All in all, the findings presented in this PhD dissertation indicate that transilience may tap into a fundamental aspect of human capacity to adapt to a wide range of adversities, as it can be displayed regardless of the specific ways in which adversities manifest, and even in the face of very severe threats. Importantly, our results do not imply that 5
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw