Social Interaction: A Study on the Openness Attitude of Both Religion Believers towards the Other Believers in the Southern Thailand

The Southern of Thailand citizens are known as the plural society that possesses various different religions. Even though the citizens are from multi-religious society, the majority of them are Muslims and followed by the Buddhists. It is a continuous issue for the religious believers in the Southern of Thailand in communicating with the other religious believers. Their interaction process is always accompanied by the suspicion and doubt among each other. Among the concepts of harmonious living in a religious pluralism society, openness attitude is the most important basic concept. It plays the significant role as a tool to form a good relationship among people. Therefore, this study is meant to scrutinize to which extent the religious teaching that teaches on the religious harmonious of life influence its believers in interpreting it to an openness attitude in their daily interaction. This study utilised two main methods namely the qualitative and the quantitative approaches. The results from the descriptive analysis depict that most of religious believers in the Southern of Thailand possess the openness attitude in interacting with the other believers at a good level as 40.02% of them agreed, and 30.96% of them strongly agreed on the issue. Hence, the findings have convinced the study that majority of the citizens in the Southern of Thailand are highly motivated to live harmoniously. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that there are some of the religious believers failed to practice the openness attitude when interacting with the other believers, so it is a must to identify the causes in order to offer the best solution for it.