The fallacy of long-term consequences.
Reminding your audience that immediate actions have long-term consequences is a waste. Right now is all that matters. The average person taps, clicks or swipes their smartphone 2,617 times per day. Dopamine works, and we’re addicted to the hit of real-time gratification.
Meanwhile, well-meaning organizations communicate long-term consequences to encourage behavioral change. I call this System 2 messaging. My thinking is grounded in Daniel Kahneman’s interpretation of dual-system theory, where our behaviors are governed by two systems. System 1 decisions are fast, habitual and intuitive. System 2 decisions are more contemplative and grounded in logic.
System 2 messaging tends to dominate efforts by state agencies and nonprofits to change behavior. Too often, public service announcements depict far-future negative outcomes. For example, the education campaigns that show kids at a party drinking alcohol and getting behind the wheel. System 2 messaging assumes viewers will logically avoid a behavior when shown the devastating scenarios it can cause. After all, isn’t it your job to show teenagers the disastrous outcomes that can happen to them?
Let me issue a strong, counterintuitive no. The aforementioned “don’t drink and drive” example of System 2 messaging won’t resonate because of a mental shortcut, or heuristic, called optimism bias, sometimes referred to as comparative optimism. The person being educated by the public service announcement literally believes that the unintended outcome can’t, or at least probably won’t, happen to them. The same thinking is at work with the 75 percent of smartphone users who admit that they have texted while driving.
How do you educate people using a heuristic like optimism bias?
You have to instill down-the-road pain into the audience’s immediate reality.
Important note here. This isn’t achieved by shocking your audience with jarring and disastrous vignettes. I see too many efforts to shock an audience into behavioral change. This fails because it only plays into furthering optimism biases. The more troubling or grim a scenario you depict, the more an optimism bias will be fueled and reinforced. The more drastic or dramatic the depicted outcome is portrayed, the more unrealistic or unlikely it will seem. You need to make a future pain not only believable but relatable. In the case of drinking and driving, the pain of losing privileges is more relatable to a teenager than showing them a carful of skeletons.Let the audience take action – right now.
A contraceptive access campaign I advise demonstrates the value of immediate action. Research showed that only 64 percent of consumers always protected themselves from unintended pregnancy. Optimism bias, “I probably won’t get pregnant,” justified risky behavior. It didn’t however prevent lingering consternation about the possibility.
In 2018, consumers could make an appointment for free or low-cost birth control by dialing **nodrama on their cell phone. Early in the campaign, we added the option of filling out an appointment request form on the initiative’s website. Appointment requests increased by 181 percent. In 2020, we introduced telemedicine, and appointment requests increased by another 106 percent. Allowing a near-immediate way to address lingering apprehension was an effective counter to optimism bias.
The graph below shows spikes in appointment requests following the introduction of an appointment request form and telemedicine.
3. Don’t know better.
In most cases, you aren’t representative of the audience receiving your message. Respect the fact that this renders you ineffective at judging the most effective approach to messaging. In fact, what appeals to you may well repel your audience. Don’t tell people things they already know using dramatized outcomes. Reminding them of the far-reaching implications of their behavior is talking down to them – like a parent. It robs you of authentic engagement and reinforces the heuristics that justify the continuation of negative behavior. For example, a mom lecturing her child about the dangers of vaping only deepens the child’s perception that she is clueless about the constant social pressures they face every day. So, why would anyone want to message similarly?
The path forward.
One needs to identify what heuristics are contributing to the behavior you are trying to change. If your cause is prevention-based, it’s especially easy to give way to System 2 messaging scare tactics. A great example is the proverbial totaled car parked in front of the school entrance the week of the prom.
Here’s a video that capitalizes on another heuristic called the framing effect. The framing effect is a cognitive bias in which the brain makes decisions based on how the information is presented.
None of us believes that school lunches are particularly tasty, but many assume regulations and government oversight ensure menus aren’t harmful. In this case, the American Heart Association and the American Stroke Association use a heuristic to highlight the truth. Here’s why it succeeds:
It doesn’t talk about long-term consequences of poor eating habits. We all know that already.
It doesn’t try and scare us by depicting a dire future. This merely shuts people down, especially when thinking about their child.
It speaks to a truth any parent knows. Kids love pizza and french fries, and they can’t make smarter choices without other options.
Whatever your issue, better-informed messaging can move the needle more and faster. There’s so much positive change needed out there. Thanks for being part of it.
Until next time,
Kevin
