It’s hard to convince a skeptical audience that something bad will happen unless preemptive action is taken. For instance:
If your audience doesn’t trust you, ratcheting up the rhetoric won’t change their minds.
If your audience senses you’re trying to scare them into changing their behavior, they will resist your message.
If you have repeatedly raised the alarm about impending catastrophe, but nothing that bad has happened yet, your audience will take you less and less seriously.
If you don’t acknowledge past false alarms, your audience won’t respect you - they will just think you’re a scaremonger.
If you convey that resistance to your message has no merit, those who have resisted your message will stop listening to you.
If you insist on radical self-sacrifice, “or else” - your audience will call your bluff.
If you are demanding a specific course of action that is both costly and of uncertain efficacy, your audience will resist.
If you present a worst case scenario as the likely scenario unless a specific course of action is taken, your audience will consider you dishonest.
If you pile on a mix of good and bad evidence in an attempt to overwhelm opposition to your message, your audience will consider you dishonest.
How, then, can one persuade a skeptical audience that they must act to avert a very real danger? Some tips:
Allow that you can’t read the future - that you’re talking about probabilities, not certainties.
Focus on positives as much as possible: what provides a sense of reward, accomplishment or progress.
Focus on doable actions and behaviors that have unambiguously positive effects.
Whenever possible, identify and discuss other benefits to the behavior you want to encourage - that is, benefits unrelated to the particular threat you’re concerned about.
Seek common ground, focusing on points of agreement.
Be honest about areas of disagreement, without conveying that your audience is stupid, lazy, or morally suspect for disagreeing with you.
These principles apply just about whenever we want to convince people to take action for their own good, or the common good. Here’s some relevant research:
In a 27-country study looking at proenvironmental behavior, such as recycling and driving less, the effect of “perceived behavioral control” was five times stronger than “general threat” in predicting participants’ willingness to sacrifice for the environmental good. That is, to the extent that people felt they had sufficient ability and situational control to sacrifice some convenience or comfort to achieve a desirable goal, they were more likely to make that sacrifice, as opposed to being scared into it (Oreg and Katz-Gerro, 2006).
Maslansky & Partners, a market research firm, ran a national opinion survey, and did a couple of three-hour sit-downs with “media-informed” utilities customers to gauge their receptivity to messaging about renewable energy. The researchers found broad willingness to pay higher utility bills to support the expansion of renewal energy as long as it was done in a way that was “balanced, gradual, affordable, [and] reliable.” Customers were also more receptive to messages that were positive and pointed to clear actions with measurable impacts (Roberts, 2018).
Researchers looked at what sorts of messages were effective at getting people to change their health-related behaviors. They found that in “relation to the fear-based appeal, somewhat surprisingly, no significant effects were found” when it came to behavior change. Perceived ability to cope determined whether individuals initiated behavior change (Lewis, Watson, et al., 2013).
Studies on the effectiveness of driver safety messages found that messages that focused on “fear arousal” were more likely to be rejected, while those that focused on concrete, doable behaviors were more likely to be accepted. Believing that a certain behavior would actually be effective - what’s known as “response efficacy” - is central to message acceptance (Lewis, Watson, et al., 2010; Tay & Watson, 2002).
Bottom line: fear messages are often counter-productive, especially when unalloyed by practical advice.
References:
Lewis, I., B. Watson, et al. (2013). "Extending the Explanatory Utility of the EPPM Beyond Fear-Based Persuasion." Health Communication 28(1): 84-98. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10410236.2013.743430
Lewis, I. M., B. Watson, et al. (2010). "Response efficacy: The key to minimizing rejection and maximizing acceptance of emotion-based anti-speeding messages." Accident Analysis & Prevention 42(2): 459-467. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2009.09.008
Tay, R., & Watson, B. (2002). Changing drivers' intentions and behaviours using fear-based driver fatigue advertisements. Health Marketing Quarterly, 19(4), 55-68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J026v19n04_05
Utilities have a problem: the public wants 100% renewable energy, and quick by David Roberts/Vox.com Updated Oct 11, 2018