Limitations
There were some limitations that should be borne in mind when interpreting the results. Firstly, as Australia did not experience high levels of community transmission of COVID-19 in 2020, these findings may not generalise to more affected countries. Secondly, the generalisability of our findings in study 3 was limited by the female-only sample and the difficulties we faced recruiting a gender diverse sample of participants through social media. It is unclear why we had these difficulties; however, previous research has suggested that females are more willing to participate in research [We also want to acknowledge that our article manipulations may have been limited in their influence as they were competing with considerable COVID-related media at the time. Whilst this may have limited the impact of our manipulation, participants in all three studies reported feeling more threatened by COVID after reading the threatening article, suggesting that if threat was sufficient to change intentions, we should have seen an impact. In addition to this, in our second pilot study, those who read the threatening COVID article also were able to correctly recognise a greater proportion of COVID-related facts, relative to those who read a control article. Thus, even though there was an oversaturation of competing messages about COVID-19, our articles did contain new information and led people to feel more concerned and threatened by COVID.Lastly, although using intentions as a proxy for behaviours is common, intentions are not an infallible predictor of behaviour [