The effects of narrative messages on optimistic bias in South Korea: a focus on controllability, collectivism, and risk perception in a massive fire crisis

ABSTRACT

This study examined the effect of narrative messages of a massive fire crisis on optimistic bias by experimentally comparing the effect of narrative describing a personal story on the crisis incident and that of non-narrative message (Study 1). Researchers further sought the interaction between controllability and the narrative message and the mediated moderation model of risk perception. In Study 2, the effect of narrative message describing a group story on the crisis incident on optimistic bias was further tested in terms of South Korea’s collectivistic culture. Collectivism, along with controllability, was used as a moderator, and mediated moderation models of risk perception were tested. The present research offers several major findings: (1) a narrative message describing a personal story decreased optimistic bias, (2) among people who read a narrative describing a personal story, those with high controllability had a lower level of optimistic bias than those with low controllability, (3) among people who read the narrative of a group story, those with high collectivism had a lower level of optimistic bias than those with low collectivism, and (4) the interaction between message types and collectivism affected risk perception and this risk perception increased optimistic bias. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative message
• optimistic bias
• controllability
• collectivism
• risk perception

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Yungwook Kim (Ph.D., University of Florida) is a professor at the School of Communication & Media, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea. His research focuses on risk communication, crisis management, and communication political economy.

Jiyoung Lee is a Ph.D. student in S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University. Her main research interests lie in interactive media and well-being, risk communication, and emotional communication from a socio-psychological perspective.

Seunkyung Ham is a Ph.D. candidate at Ewha Womans University. Her research area is disaster communication.

ORCID

Yungwook Kim http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2764-7907

Jiyoung Lee http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0800-9355

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government [grant number NRF-2014S1A3A2038236].