Health Psychology

Eat less meat! Stay out of the sun! Get more outdoor exercise! Quit smoking! Drink red wine! Don’t drink too much! Quit sugar! Cut your carbs! Get more sleep! Lose weight! Build muscle! Get lean! Everything in moderation…

Anxious? Depressed? Overwhelmed?

The sheer volume of competing messages in various formats from newspapers, social media, billboards, television and radio make it a daily challenge for advertisers to get their message to the consumer. Therefore it’s a daily challenge for consumers to make sense of sound advice and good ideas as opposed to tricks and deceptions.

To try to attract our attention, advertisers continually bombard us with more extreme images and content to encourage us to engage with their messages.

Health warnings are no different. How many of us have been drawn to and repulsed by graphic cigarette packages which depict cancerous lungs and mouths regardless of whether we smoke or not?

In recent years there have been efforts to highlight the dangers of tanning by showing graphic images of surgeons cutting cancers from patients.

They’re all important messages, of course, but do they work?

Research suggests we need to be cautious about trying to shock and scare people into action. For example, in one curious study, researchers had participants rate their intention to buy sunscreen. Prior to rating the sunscreen, each participant was reminded about their mortality. That is, they were reminded that they were going to die one day.

As expected, participants said they were likely to purchase sunscreen presumably because the fear of dying shocked them into being cautious.

However, for a second group of participants the researchers changed it up. After reading about their mortality, participants completed an activity that helped switch their attention and distanced them from their thoughts about dying. After the interruption, they indicated that they were less likely to purchase the same sunscreen.

When we feel threatened our immediate conscious mind does what we expect. We remove ourselves from risks and tell our future selves to behave.

Unfortunately, once the thoughts and fears subside, and the message is no longer salient, we often revert back to how we’ve behaved in the past.

A second study showed that—unconsciously—highlighting a person’s mortality seemed to generate a paradoxical effect, driving the very behaviour that the information should have supressed. That is, participants indicated they were more likely to purchase tanning products.

Why does this happen? Tanning essentially enhances our self-confidence because it improves our appearance. So, unconsciously, our motivation to tan increases as a means to feel better about ourselves after experiencing a brief yet troubling period of musing on our mortality. The researchers have written an interesting article about it here.

What does this say about health messages that continually remind us about our mortality? Could they be unintentionally driving a motivation to take risks?

Although this is just one study and I’m sure the health professionals could call on hundreds if not thousands of studies that show otherwise, this one was intriguing enough to capture my attention.