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Effective strategies for responding to rumors about risks: The case of radiation-contaminated food in South Korea

This experimental study explores how governments should respond to rumors about national-level risk issues. Informed by research in rumor psychology and risk/crisis communication, it investigates whether type of rumor and rumor response strategy have main and interaction effects on reducing rumor be...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Paek, Hye-Jin, Hove, Thomas
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier Inc. 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7126673/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32288053
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2019.02.006
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author Paek, Hye-Jin
Hove, Thomas
author_facet Paek, Hye-Jin
Hove, Thomas
author_sort Paek, Hye-Jin
collection PubMed
description This experimental study explores how governments should respond to rumors about national-level risk issues. Informed by research in rumor psychology and risk/crisis communication, it investigates whether type of rumor and rumor response strategy have main and interaction effects on reducing rumor beliefs and intention to disseminate rumor. The two featured rumor types are the bogie rumor, which highlights feared outcomes, and the wedge rumor, which aims to reinforce differences between rival groups. Derived from Situational Crisis Communication Theory, the three response strategies examined are refuting the rumor, denying it, and attacking its source. Data were drawn from part of a large-scale online experiment, and the sample of the analysis was 942 South Korean adults. The experiment had a between-subjects design of 2 rumor type (wedge vs. bogie) x 3 government response strategies (refutation, denial, attack the attacker). Results show that all three rumor response strategies significantly reduced rumor beliefs, but only the refutation strategy significantly reduced intention to disseminate the rumor. Rumor type (bogie) and response strategies (refutation) had main, but not interaction, effects on reduction of intention to disseminate the rumor.
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spelling pubmed-71266732020-04-08 Effective strategies for responding to rumors about risks: The case of radiation-contaminated food in South Korea Paek, Hye-Jin Hove, Thomas Public Relat Rev Article This experimental study explores how governments should respond to rumors about national-level risk issues. Informed by research in rumor psychology and risk/crisis communication, it investigates whether type of rumor and rumor response strategy have main and interaction effects on reducing rumor beliefs and intention to disseminate rumor. The two featured rumor types are the bogie rumor, which highlights feared outcomes, and the wedge rumor, which aims to reinforce differences between rival groups. Derived from Situational Crisis Communication Theory, the three response strategies examined are refuting the rumor, denying it, and attacking its source. Data were drawn from part of a large-scale online experiment, and the sample of the analysis was 942 South Korean adults. The experiment had a between-subjects design of 2 rumor type (wedge vs. bogie) x 3 government response strategies (refutation, denial, attack the attacker). Results show that all three rumor response strategies significantly reduced rumor beliefs, but only the refutation strategy significantly reduced intention to disseminate the rumor. Rumor type (bogie) and response strategies (refutation) had main, but not interaction, effects on reduction of intention to disseminate the rumor. Elsevier Inc. 2019-09 2019-05-15 /pmc/articles/PMC7126673/ /pubmed/32288053 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2019.02.006 Text en © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Paek, Hye-Jin
Hove, Thomas
Effective strategies for responding to rumors about risks: The case of radiation-contaminated food in South Korea
title Effective strategies for responding to rumors about risks: The case of radiation-contaminated food in South Korea
title_full Effective strategies for responding to rumors about risks: The case of radiation-contaminated food in South Korea
title_fullStr Effective strategies for responding to rumors about risks: The case of radiation-contaminated food in South Korea
title_full_unstemmed Effective strategies for responding to rumors about risks: The case of radiation-contaminated food in South Korea
title_short Effective strategies for responding to rumors about risks: The case of radiation-contaminated food in South Korea
title_sort effective strategies for responding to rumors about risks: the case of radiation-contaminated food in south korea
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7126673/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32288053
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2019.02.006
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