This study begins with the assumption that the process of attitude changes toward religion may have different ways of acceptance and processing from the persuasive messages in the area of advertising marketing or political communication. This is becau...
This study begins with the assumption that the process of attitude changes toward religion may have different ways of acceptance and processing from the persuasive messages in the area of advertising marketing or political communication. This is because religious attitudes are different from the attitudes that are easily formed in a short period of time due to the characteristic that once established, religious beliefs and attitudes do not change for a long time.
Therefore, this study examined the differences in persuasion effect according to religion, assuming the type of message content (personal vs. social), the type of source (non-expert vs. expert), and the individual personality factors as important variables explaining the persuasive effects of the religion messages.
First, the religious persuasion message was divided into personal message and social message by using the elaboration likelihood model. Then, it was expected that the group of religion with a high level of religious belief intensity and existing religious message processing tendency would process religious persuasion messages through the central route. It was assumed that there would be no difference in the information processing ability of religious messages. The type of cognitive processing was defined as the usual processing tendency of neutral religious messages.
As for peripheral cues, the variables were composed of expertise among the source's credibility, openness of personality factors, and emotional instability. In order to examine the influence of source's expertise, the effect was measured by dividing them into expert group and non-expert group.
In this study, religious attitude refers to the degree of awareness of religion, and religious attitude was classified into attitude toward religion itself and attitude toward religious behavior. This is because attitudes toward religion itself are areas of belief, and religious acts are areas of likes and dislikes on specific issues with different dimensions. The research questions are as follows.
Research question 1. Is there a difference in the persuasion effect of religious messages according to the processing of the central route and the peripheral route?
Research question 2. Is the persuasion effect of religious messages different depending on the content of the message (personal vs. social) and the type of source (non-expert vs. expert)?
Research question 3. Does the persuasion effect according to the content of the message and the type of source vary depending on the individual's openness and emotional instability?
Research question 4. What is the difference in the relative influence of various factors involved in the persuasion effect of the message?
A total of 789 questionnaires were analyzed through purposive quota sampling method, divided into four groups: personal message vs. social message group and general informant vs. expert informant group. The result shows that attitude change in the peripheral route processing was greater than the central route. In the central route processing, nearly 60% of the respondents had more than 20 years of religiosity, resulting in a ceiling effect, so there was not much change in attitude. In the peripheral route processing with a relatively large change in attitude, openness was found to be the main variable in attitude change among the expert source and personality factors.
With regards to the type of message content, attitude change by the personal message was greater than the social message as a whole. This seems to be related to the undulating faith, a distinct religious characteristic of Korean that prays for personal well-being and family happiness. In the type of source, messages from expert showed a greater change in attitude than non-expert. This result is consistent with studies that have verified the credibility of sources among studies using the elaboration likelihood model. However, unlike the expert source effect in the existing advertising marketing field, the religious persuasion message was found to produce a meaningful persuasion effect even for non-expert source. Such result is different from previous studies.
For personality factors, openness was found as a major variable in attitude change, but emotional instability appeared to have no correlations with attitude change. Also, according to the result of investigating various factors together related with the persuasion effect of the message, in addition to the types of message content and source, the persuasion effects of the religious message were found to be affected by religious status, gender, age, and so on.
This research differs from others, considering it expanded the academic realm of religious communication, tested the persuasion effect by dividing the contents of religious persuasion messages into personal and social types, and verified individual personality factors as persuasion effect variables. In addition, this study provides practical implications to the religious community in that it presented the direction of creating messages of evangelism (mission) using the characteristics of non-religious people.
Keywords: persuasive communication, religious communication, type of source, type of message content, elaboration likelihood model (ELM), personality factors, openness, evangelism (mission)