A cross-cultural study on the persuasive effectiveness of fear appeals messages in advertising: An empirical investigation on Canadian and Chinese subjects

This exploratory study investigated the effects of cultural differences on persuasion of fear appeals communication. Based on Rogers' Protection Motivation model, the framework of the study was developed by incorporating type of fear as an independent variable and culture as a moderating variable. An experiment was conducted using 12 anti-smoking ads with three levels of fear appeals (high, moderate, and low) and two types of fear appeals (physical and social) on 173 Canadian and 180 Chinese subjects.;The findings indicated that the Canadian subjects experienced attitude change toward smoking after viewing the anti-smoking ads. For the physical fear ads, the Canadian subjects had more negative attitude toward smoking and higher behavior intention to quit. No significant difference was found for the social fear ads between the two cultural groups. As for the level of fear, findings indicated that increasing fear arousal resulted in an ad attitude change and an increase in behavior intention in the future for both Canadian and Chinese subjects but not in the attitude toward smoking.;Further exploration of the proposed framework found that self-efficacy was an important cognitive variable to change attitude for the two cultural groups. Coping response efficacy was effective in changing attitudes for the Canadian subjects, while severity had more influence for the Chinese subjects. Fear-persuasion models for the Canadians and Chinese were proposed.