The effectiveness of reassuring and fear-arousing messages on consumer attitudes towards GM food

This study investigates the impact of a threat appeal versus a reassuring appeal on consumers’ attitudes towards GM food. A between-subject factorial experiment manipulated three types of information about GM food: a fear-arousing message, a reassuring message, and a message combining both a fear- arousing and a reassuring message. Additionally, comparison with a control group was made. The hypotheses were based upon the EPPM (Witte, 1992) and Means-End Chain theory (Gutman, 1982). The results show that the reassuring message significantly increases respondents’ attitude towards GM food, compared to the fear arousing message, the combination message, and the control group. The ethical personality trait ‘moral equity’ moderates this main effect. While high moral people indicate significantly lower attitudes towards GM food than low moral people, this difference becomes even more striking in the reassuring conditio