The Religious Framing Impact on Counterarguing Towards Vaccination Ads: Consideration of the Extended-ELM Perspective

Abstract

As the fluctuating effects of the pandemic continue, vaccination studies accelerated to ensure mass immunity. However, considering the speed of inoculation, it should be emphasized that it is evident of hesitancy threatening the achievement of herd immunity. The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply stirred up suspicions about many new habits in daily lives; therefore the vaccination has no exception. This paper is dedicated to examining communication framings designed to promote vaccination programs, as it might be a communicative remedy of counter-responses against the vaccination. Yet, a great deal is unexplored how the pandemic causes people to generate counterarguments against the vaccination program. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze which features of the communications lead to such a negative belief and investigate the effects of religious framing on vaccination attitudes, based on the fact that people take a religious perspective in crisis times. Findings by 2×2x2 between-subjects design of ANCOVA revealed that selecting a framing path influences the general thought about vaccination, and religious-framed messages have the ability to transform counterarguing tendency. But these capabilities have some limitations and religious framing generally benefits through interaction with loss-framed messages. The theoretical contributions were mentioned following the results.