Technoglitch
Core Member
Smoking kills, condoms protect against disease, and vaccines keep you alive. These messages have been drummed into the public consciousness for decades.
They’re all effective because fear sells, according to a new study.
“Terror management theory” and other ideas remain controversial among academics, who continue to debate whether fear is an effective tool for influencing attitudes. The latest study finds that those messages work nearly every time – and work especially well on women audiences and in prompting one-time behaviors, according to results published today in the journalPsychological Bulletin.
“Fear produces a significant though small amount of change across the board,” said Dolores Albarracin, one of the authors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Presenting a fear appeal more than doubles the probability of change relative to not presenting anything or presenting a low-fear appeal.”
The psychologists analyzed 127 pieces of research, and 27,000 individuals, from 1962 to 2014.
The messages collected in the studies were proven to have an effect on behavior, especially on one-time decisions, like getting a vaccine or voting against a political candidate, they found.
The warnings were also more effective among women-targeted audiences. The effect was also bolstered when the fear message includes a method to avoid the threat, like using a condom.
No “backfire” effects in response to the messages were seen throughout the half-century of campaigns, contrary to some theories, they found. But they were almost always at least a little effective, they concluded.
“Fear appeals consistently work, and through our meta-analysis we were able to identify various factors that can enhance their effectiveness to make them work even better,” they concluded.
According to some accounts, the use of fear in advertising goes back to Freudian psychoanalysis – and even specifically to a Listerine advertisement at the beginning of the 20th century which appealed to Americans’ fear of bad breath.
A marketing consultant named Clotaire Rapaille, renowned for his take on mass consumerism, has called the drive that fuels trends such as the surge in SUVs sales post-9/11 the “reptilian brain” that is primal in its survival instinct.
Fear Sells: 50 Years of Influencing Behavior from Cigarettes to Condoms
They’re all effective because fear sells, according to a new study.
“Terror management theory” and other ideas remain controversial among academics, who continue to debate whether fear is an effective tool for influencing attitudes. The latest study finds that those messages work nearly every time – and work especially well on women audiences and in prompting one-time behaviors, according to results published today in the journalPsychological Bulletin.
“Fear produces a significant though small amount of change across the board,” said Dolores Albarracin, one of the authors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Presenting a fear appeal more than doubles the probability of change relative to not presenting anything or presenting a low-fear appeal.”
The psychologists analyzed 127 pieces of research, and 27,000 individuals, from 1962 to 2014.
The messages collected in the studies were proven to have an effect on behavior, especially on one-time decisions, like getting a vaccine or voting against a political candidate, they found.
The warnings were also more effective among women-targeted audiences. The effect was also bolstered when the fear message includes a method to avoid the threat, like using a condom.
No “backfire” effects in response to the messages were seen throughout the half-century of campaigns, contrary to some theories, they found. But they were almost always at least a little effective, they concluded.
“Fear appeals consistently work, and through our meta-analysis we were able to identify various factors that can enhance their effectiveness to make them work even better,” they concluded.
According to some accounts, the use of fear in advertising goes back to Freudian psychoanalysis – and even specifically to a Listerine advertisement at the beginning of the 20th century which appealed to Americans’ fear of bad breath.
A marketing consultant named Clotaire Rapaille, renowned for his take on mass consumerism, has called the drive that fuels trends such as the surge in SUVs sales post-9/11 the “reptilian brain” that is primal in its survival instinct.
Fear Sells: 50 Years of Influencing Behavior from Cigarettes to Condoms
