HOW TO CONVINCE PEOPLE NOT TO STEAL

HOW TO CONVINCE PEOPLE NOT TO STEAL

PETRIFIED WOOD FROM A NATIONAL PARK Social psychologist Robert Cialdini (2003) has discovered that some

types of appeals are more effective than others in discouraging environmental theft. He performed a very clever field experiment in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, which suffers from a loss of 14 tons of petrified wood stolen by visitors each year. Cialdini tested the relative effectiveness of two types of signs posted at entrances to visitor walking paths. The descriptive-norm appeal read “Many visitors have removed petrified wood from the Park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest” and was accompanied by pictures of three visitors taking wood. The injunctive-norm sign stated “Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the Park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest” and was accompanied by a picture of one person stealing a piece of wood with a red circle and bar through it over his hand. Results showed that theft of specially marked pieces of petrified wood over five weeks was higher (7.9%) in the vicinity of the descriptive-norm signs than it was around the injunctive-norm signs (1.7%). Why the difference? Cialdini argues that the descriptive approach, although trying to impress on visitors the enormity of the theft problem, in fact may be legitimatizing it by suggesting “everybody does it.”

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Positive Effects of Social Marketing

In spite of the obstacles, social marketing media campaigns do have some clear positive effects, The first effect is an altered perceived reality that includes a heightened awareness of the problem. Virtually everyone in North America is aware of the health dangers of smoking or not wearing seat belts; such was not the case 40 years ago. Unlike 20 years ago, most people today are aware of the need for organ donors (Shanteau & Harris, 1990), largely due to media publicity.

A second positive effect is making the problem more salient, thus increasing receptivity to other influences in the same direction later. Even though a particular PSA may not immediately send a person to the doctor to check a suspicious mole for possible melanoma, that person may pay more attention to a later message on that topic and may be a little more careful about excessive exposure to the sun. An eventual behavioral change may actually be a cumulative effect from several influences. This, of course, makes it very difficult to scientifically measure precise effects of particular media campaigns.

A third effect is the stimulation of later conversation with one’s family, friends, or doctor. Publicity about the dangers of smoking may encourage supper table conversation between parents and teenagers who are being encouraged by peers to smoke. Although a decision not to smoke may result more from the personal interaction than directly from the message, the latter may have partially laid the groundwork for the discussion. Sometimes media publicity may be responded to too strongly. By the early 1990s, pediatricians were being warned against overdiagnosing Lyme disease. A high level of media publicity over the preceding few years was leading patients to ask about this illness and physicians to be quicker to diagnose it, In the psychological realm, the explosion of diagnoses of child sexual abuse in adults with very common and non-specific symptoms in the 1990s, led to huge controversies in the counseling field (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994).

A fourth effect of social marketing campaigns is the generation of self- initiated information seeking. Someone may seek additional information on some topic as a result of interest being piqued by media attention to that issue. They might ask the doctor about it on their next visit; they might read

a newspaper article on the topic that they would have passed by before. Finally, prosocial media campaigns can reinforce positive existing attitudes and behavior, such as encouraging the ex-smoker to try hard not to succumb or reinforcing someone’s feeling that he or she really should see a doctor about some medical condition, Often people know what they should do but need a little encouragement to actually do it.

Now we examine one of the major domains of social marketing campaigns, public health.

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Public Health Media Campaigns

Breslow (1978) identified three methods of risk-factor intervention in medicine. Epidemiological intervention involves identifying the character- istics correlated with increased frequency of the disease and taking steps to alter those characteristics. For example, cardiovascular risk factors like smoking, obesity, cholesterol level, physical inactivity, and hypertension are first identified, followed by screening people using blood pressure and blood chemistry tests.

Environmental intervention involves changing the environment in a healthier direction. For example, legislation restricting smoking in public places or reducing industrial emissions into the air or water, and adding fluoride to drinking water illustrate such interventions. Adding air bags to cars, substituting canola oil for coconut oil in fried foods, and selling lower fat milk also manipulate the environment.

The third type of intervention, educational programs, often involves media and is of most concern for our purposes. Such programs may aim to alter the perceived reality by changing knowledge by providing more information or providing an impetus for changing behavior. Often changes in knowledge are easier to effect than changes in behavior. For example, even though most smokers are well aware that smoking is bad for their health, their own perceived reality, at least at an emotional level, is that they will not develop lung cancer. Sometimes the most important cognitive message of such a campaign is that treatment and cure is possible if the illness is diagnosed early enough. This is important in combating irrational fears that a diagnosis of cancer is a death sentence and thus to be avoided at all costs.

All three types of interventions must keep in mind the culture of the target population (Ilola, 1990). For example, an AIDS-prevention campaign would (or at least should) take a very different form if targeted at North American gay men, IV drug users, health care workers, or promiscuous African heterosexual truck drivers. See Maibach and Parrott (1995) for a set of readings on psychological and communications considerations in designing health messages and J.D.Brown and Walsh-Childers (2002) for a review of health effects of media messages.

Stanford Five-City Multifactor Risk Reduction Project

A very clear and consistent finding from studies of public health social marketing campaigns is that mass media campaigns are most successful when used in conjunction with other types of intervention (see Solomon & Cardillo, 1985, for a discussion of the components of such campaigns). A good example of such a campaign is the extensive and relatively well controlled project conducted by Stanford University to reduce the instance of

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Chaffee, Flora, & Roser, 1998; Schooler, Flora, & Farquhar, 1993; Schooler, Sundar, & Flora, 1996). This project involved three central California towns with a population of 12,000 to 15,000. Two of the towns received multimedia campaigns about coronary heart disease (CHD) over a 2-year period. One of those towns also received intensive interventions targeted at the high-risk population. These interventions involved both media messages and cooperation from the medical community. Health screenings were held, specific behavior-modification programs were set up, and people’s attempted reduction of high-risk behaviors and characteristics was monitored.

Changes in both knowledge and behavior were monitored in the experimental towns and in the control town, which received no media campaign and no intervention. Results showed that media campaigns by themselves produced some increases in knowledge but only very modest, if any, changes in behavior and/or decreases in the overall percentage of at-risk people. Only when media campaigns were coupled with specific behavioral interventions and health monitoring were significant improvements and reduction of the numbers in the at-risk population seen. Similar results were found with other projects, such as a six-city study in Minnesota (Luepker et al, 1994).

Even more dramatic success came in the North Karelia project in rural Eastern Finland, which had one of the highest coronary heart disease (CHD) rates in the world. Along with media campaigns and medical intervention, environmental interventions were also instituted, including restrictions on smoking, selling more low-fat dairy foods, and substitution of mushrooms for fat in the local sausage. After 4½, years of the project, there were dramatic reductions in systolic blood pressure and stroke incidence (McAlister, Puska, & Solonen, 1982). This project had local and national government cooperation and combined what Wallack, Dorfman, Jernigan, and Themba (1993) called downstream and upstream marketing. Downstream efforts involve attempts to change consumers’ behavior (stopping smoking, starting to exercise, seeking medical checkups, using designated drivers), while upstream efforts work at changing the conditions producing or encouraging the unhealthy behaviors (restricting tobacco sales to minors, stopping sale of high-fat meat, raising the drinking age, forcing insurance companies to pay for mammograms). Downstream marketing, which has been the predominant approach in social marketing, is often limited in what it can accomplish without some upstream changes as well (M.E.Goldberg, 1995).

AIDS Awareness Campaigns

One of the most urgent public health issues of the last generation has been HIV-AIDS. Worldwide, different nations and organizations have taken a

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variety of media approaches to try to increase general awareness and knowledge and to change risky behaviors, especially in target groups like gay men, intravenous drug users, and promiscuous heterosexuals. A content analysis of 127 AIDS-awareness PSAs in the United States televised in 1988 shows that most were directed at general audiences, rather than target audiences at high risk. They tended to use rational rather than emotional appeals and emphasized the acquisition of information rather than change of behaviors (Freimuth, Hammond, Edgar, & Monahan, 1990). A similar content analysis of 317 TV PSAs in 33 different countries from 1991 to 1994 found the major emphasis was on general facts and nonbehavioral content targeted at a general, poorly defined heterosexual audience (Johnson & Rimal, 1994).

Taking an experimental approach, Flora and Maibach (1990) measured people’s cognitive involvement with the AIDS issue and exposed them to either a rationally based or an emotionally based PSA. Results showed that emotional appeals were more memorable than rational ones, especially for low-involvement people. Another study showed that information on prevention in conjunction with modeling and a chance for cognitive rehearsal of the prevention information was the most successful message (Maibach & Flora, 1993). Emotional appeals were also more effective than cognitive appeals in stimulating a desire to learn more about AIDS. For an analysis of Australian media messages about AIDS, see Tulloch, Kippax, and Crawford (1993). For an evaluation of the U.S. government’s AIDS media campaign by the Center for Disease Control, see Ratzan, Payne, & Massett (1994).

Sometimes certain high-risk groups react differently to AIDS spots than the general public does (Baggaley, 1988). In general, prevention programs targeted at gay White men have been the most successful in changing risky behaviors (Coates, 1990; Stall, Coates, & Hoff, 1988; Witte, 1992), whereas the more general appeals and those targeted at other groups have been less successful. Especially in the developing world, changes in longstanding and deep-rooted social customs are required to slow the spread of AIDS. For example, in parts of central Africa, where AIDS is spread primarily from men to women by heterosexual intercourse, polygamy and multiple sex partners for men are condoned, and women have little social power to resist men’s sexual advances or to insist on condom use. Such behaviors and attitudes may be extremely resistant to change, but will have to be altered before the spread of AIDS can be contained.

Although the use of PSAs and other media-based campaigns, especially if coupled with medical or environmental interventions and specific behavioral tips, can be useful in increasing knowledge and sometimes in changing behavior, the sell is a difficult one. Another very different use of media for prosocial ends comes in using entertainment media to convey these prosocial

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messages in the context of captivating fictional stories. We now turn to this type of media.