Fear Appeal Message as an Intervention to Increase Risk Awareness, Attitude Change and Promote Self-Protective Action to Prevent Future Zoonoses

The present study widens this scope by focusing on zoonoses in general and investigates the effectiveness of two intervention conditions. The awareness condition is targeted at increasing awareness by providing information, the fear appeal condition focuses at increasing awareness and fear by presenting information and a picture. Participants in the survey (N = 191) were randomly assigned to either the control condition, the fear appeal condition, or the awareness condition in a survey questionnaire about risks of zoonoses. Findings showed that participants who received the two intervention conditions had a more positive attitude towards the future prevention of zoonoses. Furthermore, those who received the fear appeal condition would be more inclined to change their behaviour to prevent future zoonoses. In addition, findings indicate that participants who were assigned to the fear appeal condition were more compelled to change their behaviour and had a more positive attitude towards the prevention of future zoonoses compared to participants in the awareness condition. Given these results, there is a necessity to inform people about the risks of zoonoses. Lastly, further experiments should be done on an intervention towards the prevention of zoonoses to find out if there is the possibility to raise respondent's awareness.