Can fear be used to persuade? Can you be convinced and can your behaviour change because you are afraid of the consequences of a specific behaviour? This theory is called the “fear appeal” theory. A fear appeal is a way of exposing the risks of using or not using a specific product, service or idea. It relies on a threat to the well-being of an individual that motivates him or her to take action and modify their behaviour.Road safety campaigns certainly use fear appeals a lot, explicitly seeking to shock and frighten the audience to create a feeling of exposure to risk and threat to the individual’s well being. This is a strong way of getting the viewer’s attention and create a strong and long lasting memory of the promoted message.This particular video is part of a french road safety campaign focused on the necessity of the seatbelt for both front and backseat passengers.In order for fear to be efficient in persuasion, it has to be relatable. In this video, the audience can relate immediately to this common scene of four friends in a car. A woman talks to the audience as a way of capturing the viewer’s full attention, “Something was forgotten in this car”. And right before the crash and the backseat passenger dies, the same voice says “Did you find what is missing? The seatbelt”. The aim here is to show to the viewer the possible consequences of not wearing a seatbelt, not wearing a seatbelt can be fatal. The use of fear and shock in such campaigns is based on the finding that when people feel fearful, they are motivated to reduce fear, threat or danger; most likely by complying with the suggested behaviour; in this case, fastening the seatbelt. (Keller, 1999) The literature also states that the more frightened a person is by a fear appeal, the more likely they will take positive preventing actions. As nothing is more frightening than death for most people, the risk of death should be very efficient in modifying people’s behaviour. (Hovland, et al., 1953)Two cognitive processes underlie the way people respond to a threat: threat appraisal and coping appraisal (Lazarus, 1991) This is why, in order for a fear appeal to be effective in changing people’s behaviour, it should contain both the threat itself and coping efficacy information. (Rogers, 1975; 1983) That way, the level of fear felt by the individual is manageable as he is also given information about adaptive behavioural responses. If the individual feels powerless to change the behaviour, the fear appeal will not be efficient.This may be one of the reasons why the signs, prevention messages and shocking images on cigarette packs remain quite inefficient in changing people’s behaviour. It may state that smoking kills, but since it does not indicate any specific methods to quit smoking, the fear appeal that is intended to modify people’s behaviour is not as efficient as if an adaptive behavioural response was mentioned alongside the threatening message on the pack. References:Williams, K. C. (2012). Fear Appeal Theory. Research in Business and Economics Journal, p. 63-82Keller, P. A. (1999). Converting the Unconverted: The Effect of Inclination and Opportunity to Discount Health-Related Fear Appeals. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84(3), 403-415. Rogers, R. W. (1975). A Protection Motivation Theory of Fear Appeals and Attitude Change. Journal of Psychology, 91(1), 93-114. Rogers, R. W. (1983). Cognitive and Physiological Processes in Fear Appeals and Attitude Change: A Revised Theory of Protection Motivation. Social Psychophysiology, J. Cacciopo and R. Petty, eds., New York: Guilford Press. Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and Adaptation, New York: Oxford University Press. Hovland, C. I., Janis, I. L. and Kelley, H. H. (1953). Communication and Persuasion: Psychological Studies of Obvious Change. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT66EeDU410&list=LLfH_mlMr4i05kf64gbdzqHQ&index=35
Don’t Make Decisions When You’re Hungry
Don’t Make Decisions When You’re HungryI was recently listening to a freakonomics podcast called ‘How to Make a Bad Decision’, that suggested decisions made be judges in asylum courts aren’t as objective as we might hope. The podcast focusses on a study by Chen, Moskowitz, and Shue (2016), which argues that cognitive biases such as ‘the law of small numbers’ and the ‘gambler’s fallacy’ can affect judges’ decisions on whether to approve or deny asylum to a petitioner by as much as a 10% difference. For those seeking asylum, this is a pretty big number when the decision made could greatly affect, and even possibly save theirs and their family’s lives. It’s therefore important to understand these cognitive biases and seek to prevent their effect where possible.The law of small numbers is the tendency for us to overestimate the representativeness of samples to the wider population. For example, consider a scenario in which six babies have recently been born in hospital. When asked which sequence of gender is more likely out of; (a) GGGGGG and; (b) BGBGBG, most people intuitively answer (b), even though each individual event has no relation to the others and every time a baby is born the chance of it being a boy or girl is 50:50 (Kahneman, 2011). This demonstrates how intuitive the law of small numbers is as we assume that our sample of 6 will closely resemble the general population which does balance out as being around 50:50 girls and boys due to the size of the population. In contrast, our sample is very small and therefore it is just as likely for (a) to occur as it is (b), but we don’t intuitively think this.This closely links with the gambler’s fallacy, which is our misunderstanding of the nature of randomness and our intuitive tendency to assign patterns to random processes. This cognitive bias makes us prefer (b) as it has some regularity to it, whereas (a) seems unlikely due to our lack of understanding of random processes and the fact that each individual event is not casually related to the others. Anyway, enough of the technical terms, back to the effect this has on parole judges and consequently, asylum seekers.In Chen et al’s study, the researchers argue that the gambler’s fallacy causes judges to be more likely to deny asylum by up to 5%. This number is based on how many cases the judge had already approved or denied earlier that day. If a judge approved a case the previous day, they are almost 1% more likely the deny the current case they’re looking at the day after. If the previous case was approved on the same day, this number increases to 3%. If three cases are considered on the same day, with the previous two both approved, the judge becomes 5% less likely to approve the third case. This effect is also shown in reverse when a judge denies the previous two cases, they are then 5% more likely to approve the next. This results in a 10% difference between deciding to approve or deny a case, simply based on the approval rate of cases earlier in the day. This is a huge number for a decision affecting something as important as whether or not you will be allowed to remain in the country of your choice.Another study mentioned in the podcast, carried out by Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso (2011), suggests that the time since your last meal break also leads to a cognitive bias in decision-making. This is related to Pavlovian classical conditioning, which states that we come to associate positive feelings with the stimulus present at the time after repeated co-occurrences. For example, Pavlov managed to train dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell after repeatedly presenting them with food when the bell sounded, causing them to associate the presentation of food (and the associated response of salivating) with the sound of a bell. Danzinger et al in their study found a similar effect with parole judges. This graph shows the percentage of cases approved by judges across the day, with the dotted line indicating a meal break:
As you can see, at the start of the day and immediately after a meal break there was a 65% chance that the judges would approve a case. This gradually declined until it hit 0% just before a meal break, and then shot up to around 65% again straight after the break. This is arguably because the judges experience a good feeling when they have a break and eat some food which they then associate with whatever case they then come to look at, making them more likely to approve the cases close to their meal breaks. This is another cognitive bias that seems to have a great effect on the likelihood of asylum seekers having their case approved.Whilst parole judges are trained to consider the legal merits of cases presented to them, these cognitive biases are largely unknown and not included as part of their training. I think it’s important that courts become more aware of the existence and effects of these in order to attempt to counteract them in judges decisions. In the meantime, if you’re seeking asylum I suggest you somehow aim to get a hearing first thing in the morning before the judge has looked at any other cases, or immediately after they’ve had a meal break. Moskowitz suggests that perhaps a good lawyer would be able to lobby for this. Failing this, perhaps the best option left would be to inconspicuously give the judge a snack so that they come to associate the good feeling they receive from food with your asylum case. Make sure this snack isn’t Twiglets though, because Twiglets taste gross and definitely won’t leave a good taste in the judge’s mouth!References Cialdini, R. (2009) Influence: Science and Practice. 5th edn. Harlow: Pearson Education (US). Chen, D. L., Moskowitz, T. J. and Shue, K. (2016) ‘Decision-Making Under the Gambler’s Fallacy: Evidence from Asylum Judges, Loan Officers, and Baseball Umpires’, SSRN Electronic Journal. Danziger, S., Levav, J. and Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011) ‘Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 108(17), pp. 6889-6892. Dubner, S. J. (2016) How to Make a Bad Decision. Freakonomics Radio. Kahneman, D. (2012) Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin Press/Classics.By Gemma Crook
How to Get More Instagram Likes – For Dummies
If you don’t have an Instagram account. Close this now. Read a different blog on here.Right, now that I’m speaking to the cool kids.I feel inclined to say that “this (getting more likes than usual) was just an accident, I don’t actually care about Instagram (or facebook) likes, when I got more likes than usual it just… ya know…happened….BUT……I would be lying. I care, you care, we all care. Even those that post pictures once every three months, they care. When they come back they want their likes to be above a certain number.Partial evidence of this is that I think we (avid Instagram users) can all relate to that when Instagram got rid of that feature that changes it from “Shaniqua, Raj and Betty liked your photo” into “3 likes”, we all let out a massive sigh of relief.Why you ask? Because we would no longer stress about getting the vital 10 likes, and desperately hoping for one more person to like the photo so that “Shaniqua, Raj, Betty, Andy, Pistorius, Wilma, Bushdid911, Olatunde, Delroy, liked your photo” would change to the sophisticated “10 likes”. Now we no longer have that worry as the former comes up as “9 people liked this”.
However, one thing I didn’t answer is why? Why did people let out a massive sigh of relief…?Because they care! They want to look popular, they want their ego stroked on Instagram, and apparently, this can only be done by getting a sufficient number of likes.I say they, but really… sadly, I should say “we.I’ll throw in some context: the other day I decided to make my studies more worthwhile (I am paying £9K!), so I deactivated twitter because quite frankly I was spending more time on that, then I was writing up my Abnormal Psychology revision notes. However, a leopard never changes its spots and in my case, my spots before twitter was procrastination, so guess what? After deactivating twitter, the procrastination stayed. So, what does one who wants to spend more time on their studies do? They follow EVERYONE (bar the snakes) from high school, sixth form and uni on Instagram, even though they haven’t posted a picture in over a year. No? that’s not what one would do?o…well…….Here’s why, due to following all these people (and here’s another secret, people love being followed, why? Because it means they have a clearer and higher amount of likes they can expect to receive on future photos) I decided I should post a newer picture and revamp my profile. So, I did, I still had revision notes to make but instead I thought of what the coolest picture and caption of me could be, without ya know, sounding toooooooooooooo cringe. So, then what did I do next you ask? Leave Insta and go back to my responsibilities? No. After I established quite a few followers, 40% increase, I decided why just have these followers (who I originally only followed to stalk, we all do it, stop judging me!) when I could also have my ego stroked a little?So, I posted a photo that I really like.
Although, I wasn’t sure about the success because it was one I had previously posted on facebook a few months prior, but low and behold, on that picture I got more likes than ever (woohoo!)Some may say it was all numbers, I had more followers so that would obviously mean more likes.However, as a psychologist I know it is much…much deeper than that. Purely because, many people have hundreds of followers but don’t have people who engage with them (like/comment on their pictures), so what made my followers engage with mine?As mentioned earlier, people LIKE to be followed on social media, it provides a sense of security and makes them feel special (I could have followed anyone, but I chose them). Due to these overwhelmingly positive emotions they were feeling, Cialdini would suggest they were acting in line with the reciprocity rule which is seen in all humans, as according to Richard Leakey, who considers the rule of reciprocity as a defining factor of what it means to be human, “We are human because our ancestors learned to share their food and their skills in an honoured network of obligation” (2009, p. 19). Because I followed all these new people and made them feel good about themselves they felt obliged to give something back, and what best to give on Instagram (other than money sent to your PayPal), is a big juicy LIKE.Moreover, the rule of reciprocity was not the only method being used here, social poof was also present.Due to Instagram’s lovely social proof features (I’m not getting into that, that’s another blog post, for another day which I, won’t be writing) the fact I was making a comeback was very known, by many people.I
This feature not only showed other people that their friends followed me, but it also showed them that their friends liked my picture. Regularly coming up on peoples list and people seeing other people’s behaviour towards me, according to Kelman (1958), would have made them more likely to like my picture too. Kelman argued that if the thoughts and behaviours we are seeing are divergent from our own (everyone else liked the photo), we are motivated to act as the majority does, with the assumption that the majority must be correct. People want to be correct, and that suggests why many more than usual liked my picture, they saw liking it as correct behaviour and not engaging as incorrect.“So, that’s nice and all for YOU but how do I get more likes?” I hear you wail from behind the Koan.You don’t. The title was just to lure you in and it worked because now you’re at the end of the blog, yaaayyyyy JKidding…Kind of.According to the reciprocity rule and social proof, you can get more Instagram likes by: 1) revamping your profile [especially after a hiatus]2) following lots of new people from similar circles so the activity comes up on the following page of members from said circles i.e. all from your most recent part time job3) when you decide to follow someone new, like lots of their photos as they will feel obliged to like and follow back, which could be the start of a beautiful new Instagram friendship.4) when someone likes your picture out of the blue, like one of theirs back, and you will start a liking sequence which you both benefit fromOR in an alternative universe…5) delete Instagram, make the revision notes you’ve been putting off, and get to a mind frame in which you don’t even care about likes or need your ego stroked.haha yh rightyou can follow me at @Deanneser
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