Lessons Learned from Diverse Efforts to Change Social Norms and Opportunities and Strategies to Promote Behavior Change in Behavioral Health Proceedings of Two Workshops (2017) / Chapter Skim
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2 Messaging to Change Social Norms
2 Messaging to Change Social Norms
Pages 9-24
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From page 9... ...
The panelists included Joseph Cappella, professor of communication, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and member of the committee on the Science of Changing Behavioral Health Social Norms, who has written and published widely on health and political communication. He spoke on the topic of key principles in message design.
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From page 10... ...
He asserted that one needs to construct strong appeals a priori by identifying the objective features by domain and audience that make for strong appeals. Strong appeals lead to more effective messages, Cappella argued.
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Cappella cited another example from the RealCost campaign about poisons in the body from tobacco. The constituents of tobacco can be presented in a factual way, or they can be presented with strong emotional appeal.
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MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR MESSAGE: HOW MESSAGE STRUCTURE AND CONTENT INFLUENCE ATTENTION, COGNITION, EMOTION, AND INTENTIONS Lang began by positing that people are not rational media consumers but are driven by appetitive and aversive systems, and that they often make irrational, biased decisions that are best for them. She argued that message producers can use these observations to control how people respond to messages in unconscious, automatic, and essentially physical ways.
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From page 13... ...
One way to control attention, she suggested, is to elicit an orienting response -- a physiological response to novelty and to things that are self-relevant or signal important information. She explained that several structural features of different media elicit orienting responses to make people pay attention for about 2 seconds (Lang, 1990; Lang et al., 2002, 2013a)
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From page 14... ...
Thus, Lang pointed out, the motivationally relevant content is integrated with the information one wants the audience to remember. To increase memory of seeing a message but not details of its content, Lang suggested using many structural features to draw attention to the message, highly arousing emotional material (in particular, negative in nature)
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. She explained further that using positive and negative emotions sequentially in messages helps increase memory for the message (Keene et al., 2014)
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The implication for public health behaviors and public health messaging, Foleno explained, is that humans, regardless of cultural background, level of education, or level of affluence, generally tend to be bad at • assessing both short- and long-term risk, • assessing all available evidence and weighing the pros and cons of different effects, • privileging scientific fact over personal experience, • choosing among many options, • breaking habits, and • delaying gratification. Given these attributes within a highly competitive environment of cause communications, Foleno continued, a public health messaging strategy needs to be very thoughtful and to be positioned against all the other competing issues.
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From page 17... ...
A "Friendster" video had the best results, a "door" component was probably not as useful as one might have hoped, and a video game actually turned out to work for a younger but not an older audience. This work led Pescosolido and colleagues to conclude that national testing could be done to evaluate such campaigns using social science methods and nationally representative samples.
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Pescosolido described this method as a validated scientific approach to avoiding the social desirability effect.1 In addition, one-half of the audience was asked about their attitudes toward a person with "mental illness" and one-half about a person with "schizophrenia" to see whether the particular label mattered. The researchers found that both video conditions had an equally positive effect, and it was a slightly better effect than that found in the tests in the British population.
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From page 19... ...
The discussion then addressed questions about the dramatic effects used in the "Schizo" video, how cultures such as the military need to be considered in messaging, evaluation of SAMHSA campaigns, challenges in working with advertising agencies' creative agendas, messaging and components of the Health Belief model, and use of the term "stigma." Effects Used in the "Schizo" Video William Holzemer, committee member, started the discussion of the "Schizo" video by saying that he initially thought it was an ad about child molestation or some other disturbing subject, and he believed the emotional aspect of the video overwhelmed the message. He asked the panelists who had spoken about the physiology and emotion of messaging what they thought about that reaction.
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From page 20... ...
He said that a good part of his job is to puncture the New York City advertising world's bubble and help creative teams feel more connected to the audiences they are trying to reach and establish relevance with. He described the Ad Council's experience with the military as one of its signature success stories.
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From page 21... ...
He noted that Pescosolido's research and data were better resourced than the Ad Council's, but that the campaign tested very well in the formative research stage and through all of the creative effectiveness research that the Ad Council conducted. The organization typically conducts tracking surveys and digital analytics and did see some attitude shifts when the campaign was being conducted.
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The Health Belief Model and Messaging Silberner asked Cappella to elaborate on a statement he had made that severity is more important than susceptibility. Cappella explained that this observation was the result of a meta-analysis that examined the widely tested health belief model, which posits three broad components associated with behavior change: the susceptibility that the individual experiences to a disease, a condition, or a behavior; the severity of the disease or its treatment, the condition, or the behavior; and the efficacy of the advocacy in the change message.
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From page 23... ...
MESSAGING TO CHANGE SOCIAL NORMS 23 relevant to the young adults with whom she works. She noted that the public associates "prejudice" and "discrimination" more with race than with health issues, and she uses the word "stigma" because "if we do not name it and frame it, then we cannot fight it." Foleno added that he also has seen no research on the use of the term.
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