I. Method

In September 2018, in the midst of the South Korean outbreak of MERS-CoV, we contracted with a research company to field an online panel survey. The company emailed to 13,762 South Korean adults and 2,235 registrars participated in the survey. The complete responses were 1,318. After removing the insincere responses (e.g. clicking the same answer for all questions), the final data from 988 responses were used in the analysis. Participants received compensation in the form of credit from the company after completing our 15-20-minute survey.

In order to place the respondents back in the moment of the crisis, the first page of the survey included a screenshot of a TV news program about the South Korea outbreak, which showed the Minister of Korean Center for Disease Control (KCDC) and her words about how the KCDC worked towards the quarantining of confirmed case. Our hope was that this would prompt respondents to recall the typical information to which they were regularly exposed across media during the outbreak. Then, respondents answered questions related to the variables listed above so that we could test our hypothesized relationships (risk perception, affective risk response, perceived knowledge, sufficiency threshold, information sharing-related subjective norms, perceived information-sharing capacity, information seeking and information sharing). The average age of the respondents was 40.46 years (ranging from 20 to 59 years), and 48.7% were females (n ¼ 481).

II. Literature review

II-1. Risk information seeking and processing (RISP) model

The risk information seeking and processing model (RISP; Griffin, Dunwoody, and Neuwirth 1999; Griffin, Dunwoody, and Yang 2013) serves as a framework for recognizing the socio-cognitive constructs and complex relationships among those constructs that shape information seeking and processing in risk-related contexts. The model (see Figure 1), which synthesizes its key elements from the heuristic-systematic model (Chaiken and Eagly 1993), the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen 1991; Ajzen and Fishbein 2005), and Slovic’s (1987, 2001) work on risk perception and related affect, now has more than 20 years of support behind it (c.f. Griffin et al. 2008; Kahlor et al. 2006; Yang, Aloe, and Feeley 2014; Yang, Chu, and Kahlor 2019). At its core is the sufficiency principle, which is the psychological need for ‘sufficient’ or adequate knowledge; this need serves as a motivator for the seeking and processing of risk-related information (Yang, Aloe, and Feeley 2014). Information insufficiency is ‘the size of the gap between information held and information needed’ (Griffin, Dunwoody, and Neuwirth 1999, 26). Griffin, Dunwoody, and Neuwirth (1999) argue for the importance of this knowledge gap in motivating risk information seeking and processing behaviors; that is, individuals seek and process risk information until they achieve a sufficient confidence level regarding their knowledge. It is up to the individual how high or low that level of confidence needs to be for a given situation.

II-2. RISP and information sharing 

As mentioned earlier, a number of information-sharing studies assert that seeking and sharing behaviors share motivational antecedents (Kahlor et al. 2016; Lee and Jin 2019; Lin et al. 2016; Myrick 2017; Yang, Kahlor, and Griffin 2014). Among the most notable motivators of information sharing to emerge from that body of work were: information seeking (Lin et al. 2016; Yang, Kahlor, and Griffin 2014); informational subjective norms (Kahlor et al. 2016; Yang, Kahlor, and Griffin 2014), attitude toward sharing (akin to RISP’s relevant channel beliefs; Kahlor et al. 2016; Lin et al. 2016), negative affect (Yang, Kahlor, and Griffin 2014), and prior knowledge and insufficiency (Yang, Kahlor, and Griffin 2014).

III. Measures and Research Model 

IV. Result

The purpose of this study was to examine how message interactivity featured on a PM website affects behavioral intention in a variety of ways. This study results that the “more message interactivity more systematic processing” relationship stopped at a certain point are quite interesting. In additions show that message interactivity enhanced systematic processing whereas heuristic processing was not related to message interactivity. Instead of the attenuation hypothesis, those results may be supported by the additivity hypothesis of HSM which emphasizes the independent impact of systematic processing and heuristic processing on individuals’ judgment that perception of interactivity elicits systematic processing and belief/attitude serially, message interactivity in our study potentially represents a heuristic cue for prompting systematic processing rather than directly affect heuristic processing.