Guilt works wonders

THIS isn’t about you. Think how your mother will feel if you get sick. Think how you’ll feel if you get sick and spread it around to all your friends. Do you really want to cause all that heartache and grief?

When it comes to increasing healthful behaviors, fear and guilt are far more effective than hopeful, feel-good messages, researchers report in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

When Kirsten Passyn, professor of marketing at Salisbury University in Salisbury, Md., told college student volunteers that if they didn’t use sunscreen, they’d have an increased risk of getting skin cancer, only 25% of them slathered up. But when she added guilt to the fear by telling them how devastated their families would be, 78% put on sunscreen the next day.

Three weeks later, 44% of those thinking about their mothers and fathers were still using it, she says.

Similarly, when she gave students a list of others their age who had died or whose lives had been permanently damaged by meningitis and then said that their names could be the next on the list, 7% of subjects went to the student health center for the shot.

When she told them that if they got sick with meningitis and spread it around, the names of their best friends could be on the list, 14% rolled up their sleeves for the injection.