Information Characteristics And Credibility And Their Impact On Risk Perception Of Terrorist Threats

Research on risk perception is becoming a popular academic interest at present. However, risk communication is an effective method to understand scientifically the cognition and reaction of the public when facing threats. The information characteristics in risk communication process attracts more attention for both rulers and researchers. The social amplification of risk framework and the elaboration likelihood model can provide theoretical guidance for this issue. Because of the specialty of the environment of Chinese socio-politics and culture, we selected two key factors:information sources and information contents which focus on the strength of risk negation to examine how information characteristics affect risk perception. In empirical studies, it is supported by numbers of research conclusions that information sources and information contents and credibility will affect the public’s risk perception. The purpose of this research is to study a specific crisis-terrorism threats in the context of Chinese socio-politics and culture in a combination of questionnaires and experiments way.Research one was conducted by questionnaires which used non-students adults as participants. It collected a total of 185 effective samples in Hubei province in china. Regarding information sources and credibility as independent variables and risk perception as the dependent variable, the results show that which information sources the public trust will significantly affect risk perception. What’ more, participant who believed in official sources had lower levels of risk perception.Research two was conducted through an experiment with 113 college students as participants. Regarding negative strength and credibility as independent variables and risk perception as the dependent variable, the results turn out to be non-significant on both interaction effect of the two factors and the main effect of negative strength but the main effect of credibility is significant. However, the results are consistent with the hypothesis trend, that is, whether the negative strength is strong or slight,it will have little affection on the public’s risk perception when facing high credibility sources. In contrary, when facing low credibility sources strong risk negative will cause high risk perception.