Overcoming the fear of death: incorporating worldview values into sympathy appeal organ donation messages with perceived similarity

This study aims to test the organ donation fear reduction mechanism proposed by Kong and Lee by inspecting the effect of incorporating worldview value into sympathy appeal organ donation messages emphasizing perceived similarity and the mediating role of medical trust of organ donation. A 3 (emotional appeal: similar sympathy vs. dissimilar sympathy vs. less-similar sympathy) × 2 (worldview value appeal: worldview value appeal present vs. worldview value absent) between subject online experiment was conducted. In this study, the perceived similarity was achieved via political ideology. Participants, who were identified as extremely either liberal or conservative, and paired with the protagonist who was either a lifelong democrat or republican, were considered either in a similar or dissimilar condition. When pairing protagonist with participants who were indifferent of the political ideology, those participants were considered in a less similar condition. The results (<i>N</i> = 692) showed that worldview value appeal message significantly improved the effect of less similar sympathy appeal message. The mortality salience of organ donation turned the perceived similarity and dissimilarity which is based on the same common belief into a worldview value proxy, which produced more positive attitude and behavior change toward a broader population. This study also found that medical trust of organ donation is the key driving force in attitude and behavior change.