Page 105 - The Social Animal

Mass Communication, Propaganda, and Persuasion 87

after a delay, they behaved very much like the participants with high
self-esteem. That is, if immediate action was not required but action
could be taken later, people with low self-esteem were more likely to
take that action if they were exposed to a communication arousing a
great deal of fear. People with negative self-images may have a great
deal of difficulty coping with threats. A high-fear communication
overwhelms them and makes them feel like crawling into bed and
pulling the covers up over their heads. Low or moderate fear is some-
thing they can deal with more easily at the moment they experience
it. But, if given time—that is, if it’s not essential that they act imme-
diately—they will be more likely to act if the message truly scares the
hell out of them.
Subsequent research by Leventhal and his co-workers lends sup-
port to this analysis. In one study, participants were shown films of
serious automobile accidents. Some participants watched the films
on a large screen up close; others watched them from far away on a
much smaller screen. Among the participants with high or moderate
self-esteem, those who saw the films on the large screen were much
more likely to take subsequent protective action than were those who
saw the films on the small screen. Participants with low self-esteem
were more likely to take action when they saw the films on a small
screen; those who saw the films on a large screen reported a great deal
of fatigue and stated that they had great difficulty even thinking of
themselves as victims of automobile accidents.Thus, people with low
self-esteem are apparently too overwhelmed by fear to take action
when an immediate response is required.
It should be relatively easy to make people with high self-esteem
behave like people with low self-esteem. We can overwhelm them
by making them feel there is nothing they can do to prevent or ame-
liorate a threatening situation. This will lead most people to bury
their heads in the sand—even those who have high self-esteem.
Conversely, suppose you wanted to reduce the automobile accident
rate or to help people give up smoking, and you are faced with low
self-esteem people. How would you proceed? If you construct a
message containing clear, specific, and optimistic instructions, it
might increase the feeling among the members of your audience
that they could confront their fears and cope with the danger. These
speculations have been confirmed; experiments by Leventhal and
his associates show that fear-arousing messages containing specific