Page 104 - The Social Animal

86 The Social Animal

to careless driving, and pointing out the possibility that people who
drive carelessly may have their driver’s licenses suspended? Common
sense argues on both sides of this street. On the one hand, it suggests
that a good scare will motivate people to act; on the other hand, it ar-
gues that too much fear can be debilitating—that is, it might inter-
fere with a person’s ability to pay attention to the message, to
comprehend it, and to act upon it. We’ve all believed, at one time or
another, that “it only happens to the other guy—it can’t happen to
me.” Thus, people continue to drive at very high speeds and to insist
on driving after they’ve had a few drinks, even though they should
know better. Perhaps this is because the possible negative conse-
quences of these actions are so great that they try not to think about
them. Thus, it has been argued that, if a communication arouses a
great deal of fear, we tend not to pay close attention to it.
What does the evidence tell us? The overwhelming weight of ex-
perimental data suggests that, all other things being equal, the more
frightened a person is by a communication, the more likely he or she
is to take positive preventive action. The most prolific researchers in
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this area have been Howard Leventhal and his associates. In one
experiment, they tried to induce people to stop smoking and to take
chest X rays. Some participants were exposed to a low-fear treat-
ment: They were simply presented with a recommendation to stop
smoking and get their chests X-rayed. Others were subjected to
moderate fear:They were shown a film depicting a young man whose
chest X rays revealed he had lung cancer.The people subjected to the
high-fear condition saw the same film as those in the moderate-fear
condition—and, in addition, they were treated to a gory film of a
lung-cancer operation. The results showed that those people who
were most frightened were also most eager to stop smoking and most
likely to get chest X rays.
Is this true for all people? It is not. There is a reason why com-
mon sense leads some people to believe that a great deal of fear leads
to inaction: It does—for certain people, under certain conditions.
What Leventhal and his colleagues discovered is that people who
had a reasonably good opinion of themselves (high self-esteem) were
those who were most likely to be moved by high degrees of fear
arousal. People with a low opinion of themselves were least likely to
take immediate action when confronted with a communication
arousing a great deal of fear—but (and here is the interesting part)