Why fear and shame aren’t effective strategies for driving healthy habits
Shocking: making people feel bad about themselves doesn’t lead to long-lasting change
We can all probably agree that promoting health behaviors is a good thing. Should we all try to exercise frequently or reduce our consumption of ultra-processed products in favor of more nutrient-dense, whole foods? Probably yes. Is ‘if you stay fat you are going to die’ the right message to achieve that? Probably not. But do not just take my word for it, let’s look at the science
I’m taken aback every time I see yet another public health campaign that uses fear or shame to try to get us to lose weight or engage in health-promoting behaviors. Not only because they don’t seem to understand how incredibly harmful these messages can be in contributing to the existing stigma against fat individuals and the anxiety around food that plagues a big part of our population, but also because they seem to ignore the decades of behavioral research that tell us these approaches are simply not effective.
It’s not that simple: why we can’t just ask people to lose weight
Let me begin by acknowledging this: losing weight and keeping it off is an incredibly difficult thing to do. We know most fat people have tried losing weight before and, in 95% of the cases, failed, or rather were failed by their diets (as there is not a single study that demonstrates diets are effective for sustained weight loss, with a vast majority of dieters regaining all the weight back, and then some, in the follow-up period).
And this is no surprise, given widespread diet advice seems to ignore the myriad of factors that influence weight loss. The UK’s Government Office for Science undertook the mammoth task of encapsulating the full range of contributory causes in a single model, and had to commission a team of experts from a range of disciplines (from Psychology to Sociology, Food Sciences, Genetics or Epidemiology) to produce what they called the Obesity System Map. The model is so incredibly complex that it’s almost impossible to look at without ending up with a headache, which probably should tell us that tackling the problem is not just a question of asking people to eat less and exercise more. This comes to show blaming ‘the obesity epidemic’ on individuals’ lack of willpower is not only incredibly simplistic, it is also wrong.
Even if we focus on what is within one’s individual control, a more nuanced approach is required
Lack of information is not what is standing in the way of healthier habits
The focus of many public health campaigns seems to be on raising awareness about the consequences of certain behaviors, like eating fast food or being too sedentary. But awareness, although a necessary first step to motivate people to engage in new habits, isn’t enough to drive behavioral change. Especially when it comes to healthy eating. It’s not that we think a donut is better for us than a carrot. We know the facts. But many well-studied factors override our ‘rational’ selves all the time, like the fact that we tend to prioritize short-term rewards over long-term gains (hyperbolic discounting bias), or our natural preference to preserve the status quo (inertia or status quo bias); to name just a couple.
Wanting to change isn’t enough either
While attitudes can influence behavior, an ever-increasing body of evidence today suggests that the link is not as strong as we used to think, and that our personal values or intentions don’t necessarily correlate to our actions.This is called the Value-Action Gap, and explains why we keep consuming single-use plastic despite being moved by all those images of dolphins trapped in shopping bags or why even if you are convinced that you should be eating your 5 a day and exercising regularly, you might not actually do it. This means campaigns aimed at making us want to be healthier (a desire arguably already present in most of us) won’t necessarily succeed at helping us adopt new habits.
Fear isn’t a very productive motivator
In a 2001 study, psychologists gave participants a paper maze with a mouse trapped in the middle, and instructed them to trace the fastest route to the exit. One group had a picture of a cheese on the outside, the other a predatory owl looming over the mouse. After the task, both groups were asked to complete creativity tests, and the ‘cheese group’ was significantly more successful at solving creative problems than those escaping from the owl.
There is tons of research on the different effects of fear-based(the avoid response) vs. reward-based motivation (the approach response), which shows people trying to avoid a threat exhibit reduced cognitive performance compared to those trying to get a reward: they are, among other things, less efficient at non-linear problem-solving and more likely to overreact to stressors. Is that really the mindset we want people to be in when trying to live healthier lives? And what about mental health? Surely it should not go out the window in the quest to get people to eat more vegetables?
Moreover, research looking specifically into the use of fear as a motivator in public health campaigns concludes that scare tactics like emphasizing the threat of death are just not effective in transforming behavior.
A case for making people feel empowered
What works then? The bad news is there is no easy answer. As stated before, improving our population’s health is an incredibly complex issue that won’t be solved by advertising campaigns alone. That being said, there is one area of intervention that holds great potential for successful behavioral change: improving people’s perception of agency.
A key factor in determining the effort someone is willing to put into changing their behavior (or whether they’ll even attempt it) is their perceived sense of agency, or to what extent they feel capable of carrying out a specific action and that this action will bring about the desired outcome. And the key word here is feel, as science tells us it’s the belief that matters, not the actual capability.
Thinking about that 95% of failed diets, or the piles of never accomplished New Year’s resolutions, it’s easy to understand many people feel defeated when it comes to changing their habits. So it is critical to empower them to engage in healthy behaviors, to prevent feeding a very unproductive spiral of hopelessness where change is deemed impossible and therefore not undertaken.
This means campaigns that focus on making individuals feel capable of adopting healthier habits are much more likely to succeed than those just making people feel bad about themselves. Specific and achievable calls to action (hint: not ‘Hey! stop being obese!’) or representing success through models audiences can identify with (how many of us have an actual six pack after all?) can go a long way in making healthy habits feel achievable. With the added bonus we are making people feel good about themselves in the process.
