Table 1.
The name and definition of each influencing factor.
Table 2.
The significant interactions between regulatory focus and influencing factors on attitude change in Study 1.
Fig 1.
The interaction of regulatory focus and influencing factors on attitude change in Study 1.
In a nutshell, we confirmed Hypothesis 1 that individuals’ regulatory focus can influence their attitude change when reading messages with some vaccine-influencing factors. Individuals with a high promotion focus and high prevention focus showed a greater shift toward positive vaccination attitudes after reading information about vaccine safety, credibility, and official position.
Table 3.
The significant and marginally significant interactions between regulatory focus and influencing factors on attitude change in Study 2.
Fig 2.
The interaction of regulatory focus and influencing factors on attitude change in Study 2.
Table 4.
The interactions of regulatory focus and influencing factors on persuasiveness.
Table 5.
The interactions of regulatory focus and influencing factors on behavioral intention change.
Fig 3.
The interaction of regulatory focus and influencing factors on persuasiveness.
The results of the simple effect analysis on the behavioral intention change were shown in Fig 4. The messages with vaccine effectiveness (a) can enhance the vaccination intention in high-promotion individuals to a significantly greater extent than in low-promotion individuals. It is suggested that the high-promotion individuals were induced to have higher possibilities of get vaccinated than low-promotion individuals, through the messages with vaccine effectiveness, which confirmed H13. The behavioral intention changes after reading ingroup pressure (b) messages was lower than reading the “blank” message, which means that this interaction does not make much practical sense and need not be discussed further.
Fig 4.
The interaction of regulatory focus and influencing factors on behavior change.