Health Persuasion Enablers and Barriers, Intertwined: Uncovering the Roles of Trust, Risk Tolerance, and Message Fatigue Among Australian Adults

Abstract: In government risk communication, trust plays a critical role in influencing the risk perception and actions that individuals can take to mitigate potential risk. However, an understanding of why individuals do not follow, tolerate, or are resistant to preventive behaviors as recommended from trusted sources remains lacking. To focus on this understudied research question, our study investigates a set of theory-based multidimensional enablers for and barriers to public health persuasion (i.e., risk tolerance and message fatigue) and trust in government. An online survey using a representative adult sample ( n = 510) in Australia was conducted. Key findings include (a) greater trust in government lowers the level of risk tolerance, (b) lower risk tolerance mediates the relationship between greater trust in government and behavioral intention to be more risk preventive, (c) lower risk tolerance mediates between greater trust in government and risk-preventive information seeking, (d) greater trust decreases health risk message fatigue, and (e) lower level of risk message fatigue mediates between greater trust in government and risk-preventive behavioral intention. Implications and future directions for risk communication theory and practice are discussed.