2.2.5. Pandemic Threat

We used a relatively objective standard to measure the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Chinese government released risk levels for each region daily to reflect the threat of the pandemic in each area of China, the participants were asked to choose one of four options to indicate the pandemic risk level in their area. The higher the number they chose, the higher the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic in their location. After they made their choices, we compared their self-reported risk ratings of where they lived with the official risk level. If these two levels were inconsistent, the participant's data were excluded (see also Section 2.1).

#### **3. Results**
