What if playing on hope, and not just fear, could improve the effectiveness of prevention campaigns?
The essence of prevention in public health is based on a scheme: to bring about a change in behavior by playing on a negative emotion. Cigarettes cause cancer and promote cardiovascular disease – “smoking kills”. Speed is involved in a third of road accidents – “That day, I killed her”… The examples are innumerable, which all play on the same spring: fear.
The problem with appealing to fear is that if this strategy makes it possible to modify people’s attitudes, or even their intentions, it turns out to be rather ineffective when the actual behavior is measured. People are informed, even convinced, but do not change their actions for all that. This is the syndrome of “good resolution”: the one that fails nine times out of ten.
Glow in the dark
Two American communication researchers have just published an article on the subject, which calls for a different perspective on prevention. If the call to fear is useful, because it makes it possible to draw attention and raise awareness about a public health problem, they believe that another emotional dimension intervenes to bring information to action: l ‘hope.
In order to assess their hypotheses on the role of hope, the researchers devised two experiments. In one of them, 382 students must have watched an awareness video about melanoma (edited to evoke a classic fear appeal), then answer a series of questions about the feelings they had felt. A week later, subjects were asked to indicate whether they had adopted preventive behaviors: putting on sunscreen, checking for suspicious moles, etc.
It turned out that adopting effective preventive behavior was predicted by two emotional dimensions during the viewing: fear, which is not very surprising, but also hope. The two emotions also played a role of similar magnitude.
The stick and the carrot
These elements consolidate the researchers in their conviction: to succeed, the call to fear must be mixed with a hint of hope. “When we communicate on health, it is not enough to talk to people, or only to inform them, we have to motivate them, and emotions are very good sources of motivation”, explains Jessica Myrick (Penn State). “You have to imagine hope and fear as the carrot and the stick”, adds Robin Nabi (UC Santa Barbara).
It remains to assess the call for hope in real prevention campaigns. And the researchers suggest a few avenues: focusing on possible gains (in terms of health), presenting situations in terms of opportunities (rather than risk), or even showing attractive people getting what they want … Soon anti-smoking campaigns in the form of car advertisements?
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