We often think of possible responses to fear as fight, flight, or freeze. It is easy to transfer this thinking on our teaching about topics like sustainability and climate change: in response to realising the extent of the problems we are facing, students can step up and take action, they can just not engage with the material and ignore the threat as much as possible (if I don’t think about it, it can’t be real, can it?), or they can get paralysed by the enormity of the problem. Obviously, the first option is what we want to achieve, but we have seen disengaged students and inaction often enough to be worried that exposing students to fear-inducing messages will lead to those reactions.
Tannenbaum et al. (2015) investigate the literature on “fear appeals”: messages designed to change behaviour though creating fear in the recipients that if they don’t follow that message’s advice, the consequences will harm them. In their meta-analysis of 127 articles on different aspects of fear appeals, Tannenbaum et al. (2015) consider many different facets that can potentially influence whether a fear appeal works or not: what exactly the message is, the desired behaviour, and who the audience is.
They come to the surprising conclusion that “(a) fear appeals are effective at positively influencing attitude, intentions, and behaviors; (b) there are very few circumstances under which they are not effective; and (c) there are no identified circumstances under which they backfire and lead to undesirable outcomes.”
The authors find that fear appeals are most effective when the message
- is written in a way that relatively high amounts of fear are intended,
- includes a message reassuring the recipient that they are capable of something to mitigate undesired outcomes and that those actions will have an effect,
- makes both the personal relevance and the severity of the danger conveyed in the message very clear,
- targets a one-off behaviour rather than a repeated one,
- and when the audience is mostly female.
What this study explicitly does not answer, however, is the influence of the source of the fear appeal (is it trustworthy? Perceived as benvolent or biased?) and the way fear appeals are delivered (e.g. graphic or audio? Social vs mass media?).
It does also not become clear how exactly this translates into teaching. Of course that was never the goal of the article, but that’s the lens through which I read it, specifically how should we deal with fear appeals when we teach about climate change or biodiversity loss? If fear appeals work best on mostly female audiences, what does that mean for our mostly male students at LTH? Are fear appeals still a promising way to go then? And we probably want repeated and sustained action, not just a one time effort?
But even with those questions unanswered, it is good to see confirmation that the positive, constructive messages, stressing what individual and collective action people can take, that “we can fix it“, are the way to go, and that — and this part I did not realise before — the fear appeal should be very concrete, focussing on the risk of personal harm and what that would look like. And — according to this study — the risk of this back-firing is very low!
Does this help you figure out how to approach difficult topics, like for example biodiversity loss, with students? For example rather than talking in general terms, point out the very local, very personal consequences of inaction, and then let them develop the actions that they can do and that will have a positive impact. And then we can always build on that later with a wider perspective.
What do you think? Let us know!
Literature:
Tannenbaum, M. B., Hepler, J., Zimmerman, R. S., Saul, L., Jacobs, S., Wilson, K., & Albarracín, D. (2015). Appealing to fear: A meta-analysis of fear appeal effectiveness and theories. Psychological bulletin, 141(6), 1178.
