Bernard Gauthier

The headline in the newspaper said it all: “Nothing gets attention faster than fear, study finds.” The article quotes David Zald, Associate Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University who conducts research into the functions of different parts of the brain on the processing of emotions (and apparently finds time to be a musician too). His work joins a long list of contemporary researchers who are using colourful images of our brain at work to discover just how powerful our eyes and our emotional brain really are. The trouble is the insight is hardly new and it just might usher in a rather dark period for advertising and PR. The idea that parts of the brain (the amygdala gets lots of attention here) while other parts are involved in more rational thinking is the starting point for much of this neuroscience. The links between the eyes and this rather small and apparently very ancient part of the brain is direct and fast - faster than it takes for those same visual cues to make it to the parts of our brain where we do all our deliberate, reflective, rational thinking. The result is that the small and ancient part of the brain quickly decides on the emotional colour of what our eyes see, decides whether or not this is something we should be paying close attention to, and sends these judgments off the newer, larger and slower part of the brain which is still slowly sorting through the signal.

The result: scary things get our attention, they make us think more about the situation, and they tend to be remembered by the little amygdala so that the next time we see something that kind of looks like the original scary thing, the whole process repeats itself, only faster. Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen, in their 2000 book Affective Intelligence and Political Judgement offer a clear description (even for non-scientific types like me) of the process whereby the emotional response mechanisms get “first crack” at sensory data and influences the rational response mechanisms as well (p. 37).

So, all of these experiments and powerful imaging machines are making social scientists and persuasive communicators of all types rediscover the power of fear. It seems, after all, to be the perfect solution to information overload - scare them into paying attention, behaving and remembering. 

As I mentioned, it’s not even close to new as an insight. Check out online archives of ad campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s and you’ll quickly see that advertisers of the day had also “discovered” just how powerful fear could be as a way to sell everything from Ovaltine and Cutex to yeast. What researchers of the day lacked in imaging technology, they made up for with consumer surveys and laboratory experiments. Psychologists like John B. Watson (who would eventually end up at JWT) and Daniel Starch (whose readership studies still bear his name) led the way and what they found was that, you guessed it, fear gets attention.

So here’s what troubles me about this growing fascination with fear. As I see it, the 1920s and 1930s were not a particularly great time for the ad industry or for consumers. As if getting through the Great Depression wasn’t enough, consumers had to contend with wave after wave of ads in print and on radio telling them they would surely be social outcasts if they bought the wrong brands or failed to purchase the right products. Sure the technique looked good in the lab, but in the real world, I have to suspect people got fed up and tuned most of this stuff out. The technique that was supposed to help consumers spend their way out of the depression did not work.

Fast forward 80 or so years and we’re setting ourselves up for the very same thing. Political ads are leading the way but some car companies it seems can’t think of anything more inspiring to show us than one of their vehicles slamming into a concrete block the size of an outhouse. Brilliant. Most recently, the Workplace Safety and Insurance Bureau started airing a series of graphic spots that set a new standard for graphic portrayals designed to generate fear.

On the one hand, I think the WSIB’s use of fear is appropriate given the topic at hand (workplace accidents). On the other hand, I’m afraid the campaign and the buzz it’s created will simply invite all kinds of other advertisers to mimic the strategy which, in turn, will invite all kinds of viewers and readers to avert their eyes, feel manipulated, switch channels, get angry, and hate advertisers and PR people even more. To go back to the gardening analogy I introduced in an earlier posting, the most powerful weed killers tend to kill off all the flowers around them. They should be used sparingly and in a very targeted way. The WSIB campaign fails on both counts.

Campaigns that are thoughtful, smart, funny, beautiful, elegant and quirky likely won’t test as well in laboratories and MRI machines. Our very rudimentary understanding of human thought seems better suited to understanding very rudimentary emotions, like fear and sexual attraction. Intuitively, we know these other kinds of campaigns can work. We know visuals that go beyond fear and sex can still command attention. We know great ideas and powerful works can get people talking, sharing and thinking. And we know that when we get it all right, we can invite an audience to slow down, watch a TV spot (even on the PVR), read a letter or attend an event. They’re more challenging campaigns to develop but, in the long run, they grow audiences instead of turning them off. That way, we all win.