A global crisis is a negative event that has severe well-being consequences and motivates people to make causal judgments about its origin. In particular, a global crisis is likely to lead to people’s blame of institutions that manage crises. Moreover, because people make comparisons when making these judgments, the way in which a global crisis is handled by international and national institutions is critical for its success or failure.

A recent example of a global crisis was the financial crisis of 2008, which started when liquidity in the world’s banking systems dried up in late 2007 and climaxed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. It caused a massive recession around the globe and led to a decline in the value of many currencies.

Unlike local political instability and civil wars, the causes of global crises are usually complex and hard to pin down. Nonetheless, a large body of previous research has focused on macro-level determinants of crisis impact (e.g., global financial indices, CO2 emissions, immigration flows). While this research has shed light on the effects of global shocks, it has ignored the fact that a crisis’s local impact is different in every country due to differences in a variety of factors (e.g., social structures, economic policies, geo-environmental conditions, demographic composition). In this article we propose that the way in which a global crisis is managed by international and national institutions can influence its overall success in terms of achieving public adoption of crisis-preventing behaviors that safeguard consumer well-being.