When crises become routine: crisis normalization and declining consumer sensitivity in digital environments

Abstract

Digital environments subject consumers to persistent, overlapping crisis-related information, raising important questions about how prolonged exposure reshapes consumer responses over time. This paper examines crisis normalization as a key mediating mechanism explaining changes in consumer sensitivity to crises. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of habituation, emotional depletion, and cognitive schema adjustment, the study proposes and tests a sequential mediation model in which digital crisis exposure increases crisis fatigue, which in turn fosters crisis normalization, ultimately shaping consumer sensitivity across three distinct dimensions. Consumer sensitivity is operationalized as a multidimensional desensitization construct – encompassing emotional, behavioral, and cognitive dimensions – where higher scores reflect lower responsiveness to crisis-related stimuli. Based on a quantitative survey of 200 Moroccan consumers, the results show that the sequential path from digital exposure through fatigue to normalization significantly predicts emotional and behavioral desensitization. Cognitive sensitivity, however, follows a different trajectory: rather than declining, it is partially preserved as crisis normalization reshapes cognitive processing rather than eliminating it altogether. These findings advance crisis communication and consumer behavior literature by empirically distinguishing fatigue from normalization, by demonstrating that consumer desensitization is multidimensional and not uniform across response dimensions, and by positioning crisis normalization as a central mechanism linking prolonged digital exposure to differentiated consumer responses.