Consuming Instinct, The: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal about Human Nature by Gad Saad

Author:Gad Saad [Saad, Gad]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2011-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

Universal Response to Fear Appeals

Fear appeals are one of the most frequently used tools in public service announcements, especially ones dealing with public safety (e.g., drinking and driving) or personal safety (e.g., the risks of suntanning, the dangers of engaging in unprotected anal sex, the health consequences of living a sedentary lifestyle, and having poor eating habits). A practical question gauges the amount of “optimal” fear that an advertiser should elicit in a given advertisement; the relationship between the efficacy of a fear appeal and the amount of fear that is elicited follows an inverted-U shape. Specifically, too little fear will fail in drawing one's attention to the ad, as well as perhaps signaling that the issue is not of paramount importance. However, triggering too much fear can yield a fatalistic outlook or possibly a freezing mechanism akin to that experienced by deer when facing the lights of an oncoming car.17 Too much fear can also cause an individual to avoid the message. Sarah McLachlan's song “Angel,” which plays as a background to an animal abuse public service announcement, generates a feeling of horror in me. Upon hearing the first few notes, my sole concern is to find a way to change the channel as quickly as possible as a means of avoiding the unbearable images of suffering animals (my empathy for animals makes me fearful of such horrifying images). A recent Saturday Night Live skit played on this exact issue; there is now such a conditioned relationship between McLachlan's song and the animal abuse ad that it causes many animal lovers to recoil in horror upon hearing one or two notes of the song.

An intermediate level of fear is typically vivid enough to cause individuals to dedicate cognitive resources to the message while at the same time empowering them with strategies to address and hopefully resolve the fear-inducing issue. There is no reason to think that the manner in which humans respond to varying levels of fear appeals is a culture-specific phenomenon. Rather, the fear response is a universal emotion that originally evolved as an adaptation to environmental threats. Advertisers can accordingly rest assured that the inverted-U shape described above is operative across all cultural settings and hence is definitely within the purview of a global advertising approach. Incidentally, not only is the fear response curve a likely human universal, but also certain images trigger universally innate fears. For example, snakes and spiders cause many people to recoil in horror. It is not difficult to imagine how such fears, which at times can manifest themselves as clinical phobias, might have evolved.

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