Here’s why you
should quit without being told: In a nutshell you should do it because you just
shouldn’t have to be told. In fact it would save society a lot of trouble and
mistakes getting the message across!
The renowned social
psychologist Eliot Aronson knows that negative advertising against smoking
(for instance) can create what is known as the “boomerang effect”.
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.92.2.238
People subjected
to overly-negative ads regarding, say, tooth hygiene or
smoking…”tended to withdraw mental resources from processing the messages
while simultaneously reducing the intensity of their emotional
responses” says Glen Leschner et al. of PRIME (U of Missouri).
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110822121721.htm
Martin Fishbein
of the American Journal of Public Health (2002) has spearheaded
a systemic study of the effects of negative public service ads and
found that over half of them caused a “boomerang” effect…that is a moving away
from interest in the message.
From 1952 to about 1975 such public service ads were too frequently based on fear.http://www.mnt.ee/public/Fear.pdf
And since around
the mid sixties this effect has been noticed and studied. And it’s really
true that opinion-change test subjects exposed to gruesome images of rotting
mouths and such….were not as influenced by the ads as the test subjects who saw
non-offensively designed (but also negative) ads.
The neutral ads
didn’t do much.
And since then
public service ads have become ever more sophisticated and informed by social
psychology. Extreme fear is avoided and maximum self-efficacy is encouraged.
Cognitive
dissonance is the feeling of divergence between what one really feels
and what one thinks one SHOULD feel about an issue.
The idea is to
manipulate the cognitive dissonance potential..as it were…to benefit the public
by getting them to accept the message itself. This is about public
service ads after all. Reducing dissonance is what people will want to do and
so the thing is to still make sure people want to do the right thing.
For instance if you devise a “contest” whereby people will feel “left out” if they don’t act more civically minded on a community level, then they might shift their opinion to something more proactive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
And sometimes
the whole thing will not even work. Professor Carol Tarvis says, “The people
who don’t reduce dissonance enough suffer from regret and remorse, and it can
be just as dysfunctional for them not to reduce dissonance as it is for other
people to reduce dissonance too quickly, too mindlessly.”
She goes on to say, “What do we do to not just bury the dissonance—but to accept what we did because it can’t be undone? How can we understand what we did wrong, and not just make a superficial apology, but learn in some deep way from the harm that we caused, so that we don’t make the same mistake again? “
If people run
from the truth because it is personally too painful then how can we as a caring
community alter our message to make people pay attention? Other issues come to
mind with this, including the crisis of climate change…or endless war for instance.
This article ties in to the whole Beautiful Quitters message of why you should quit, but the issue of getting-the-message out is obviously much larger.http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/an-interview-with-carol-tavris
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