Friday, February 19, 2010

The Fear Factor

Aristotle defined pathos as arguments that are based on emotions-on arousing feelings such as fear, guilt, anger, humour or compassion.Public Relations practitioners can use these appeals to induce buying a product, support a cause or take important decisions pertaining to health.

Lately we saw public service announcements like the one on creating awareness on cervical cancer and the latest one on the TB-HIV connection, on television. They are using the appeal of fear, especially the one on HIV-TB. It persuades to get oneself checked for HIV in case suffering from TB.

It is said that fear is a vital appeal to evoke the desired response, here getting yourself tested for any abnormality in health at a local government health centre.

Health promotion campaigns are typically designed to elicit fear, yet the use of fear is often ineffective in achieving the desired behavior change says R F Soames of Job Psychology Department, University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.In the abstract of his paper 'Effective and ineffective use of fear in health promotion campaigns' he adds "Campaigns which attempt to use fear as part of a punishment procedure are unlikely to succeed. Consistent with established principles of learning, fear is most likely to be effective if the campaign allows for the desired behavior to be reinforced by a reduction in the level of fear. This entails five requirements: 1) fear onset should occur before the desired behavior is offered; 2) the event upon which the fear is based should appear to be likely; 3) a specific desired behavior should be offered as part of the campaign; 4) the level of fear elicited should only be such that the desired behavior offered is sufficient to substantially reduce the fear; 5) fear offset should occur as a reinforcer for the desired behavior, confirming its effectiveness. Under some circumstances it may be difficult to ensure that these requirements are met. In general, a positive reinforcement approach may prove to be more effective than the use of fear."

Information, knowledge and Fear can be three ways to structure campaigns.In our country fear works best when it comes to doing health campaigns.The results are that people straight run to the nearest health centre for tests. What is your opinion?


  1. When problem is related with life, everybody fears.But the level differs slightly from person to person. So fear is definitely a key factor of PR campaign. Still one should keep in mind the proportion, otherwise receipe may become more salty or spicy than required.

  2. Good Topic,,,,
    I will like to say that,,,,
    Emotional fear always causes people to react faster. When we take fear appeals in ethical concerns, it always increase a factor of social iniquity between those who respond to fear campaign, tends to be better off and those who do not react tends to be careless.(Creating indirect awareness). Finally fear appeal work
    out as a forced exposure of a campaign.

  3. Good factor in health campaign (Communication). Every body wants to live long, safe and happy. In advertising, fear appeal work more than normal appeal.Because, Fear makes man in right direction. In PR campaign, fear key factor for creating awarness about any disease or any social problems. M.Devendran

  4. UNICEF says that fear appeal is not needed for its campaign, including its campaign for Polio eradication in India - (input from last week's meet for Professors of Media at Bangalore.

  5. But I wonder why the especially in India anti-smoking campaigns don't work?

    It has been seen that N number of warnings in the form of ads or any pictorial representations or articles banning smoking does not work.

    Is it that giving too much of information on the subject dilutes the severity of the message? Or maybe diseases are looked at differently by people as per its strength of attack.

    These questions if answered may help us design our campaigns better and be of use as they are meant to be.