Fear appeals persuade. But they can also paralyze.

Strong fear appeals persuade … The stronger the fear appeal, the more likely it is to move your readers to act, according to 50 years of research and 100 studies reviewed by researchers Kim Witte and Mike Allen.

In fact, a well-designed fear appeal should move about 4% of your target audience to act. So if you have 10,000 readers, 400 of them should change their behavior.

Weak fear appeals, on the other hand, don’t move audience members act.

… But they also paralyze. However, write Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin and Robert B. Cialdini in Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, when you arouse fear without clearly showing how readers can reduce the danger, they may deal with the fear by blocking out the message.

To create a message that persuades your audience without paralyzing them, structure your fear appeal in four parts:

1. Introduce the threat.

The stronger the threat, the more effective the fear appeal. So:

A. Demonstrate the severity of the threat. Professional money managers, for instance, might reach out to trustees with a fear appeal like this:

“Individual trustees who are managing trusts on their own — even those who have appointed an investment advisor in a traditional trust arrangement — are personally responsible to the trust for the performance of those assets.”

B. Describe the threat using vivid word pictures. Illustrate the horrible consequences of the threat, as in this image from the World Wildlife Fund:

“Imagine (a group of dolphins) accidentally entangled in a fishing net, struggling for every single breath as they try to thrash their way to safety.”

C.Pile on references to the threat. Here’s how the Natural Resources Defense Council does it:

The stronger the threat, the more effective it will be.

2. Demonstrate that the reader is at risk.

The more personal the threat, the more effective the fear appeal.

Teenagers, for instance, are likely to be more afraid of bad breath than of cancer from smoking, says researcher Herbert J. Rotfeld. That’s because teens don’t feel personally threatened by mortality; they think it’s something old people get.

For parents who smoke, on the other hand, the strongest fear appeal might be that their children are likely to imitate their parents’ behavior.

So personalize the message. To make your fear appeals more relevant to your readers:

A. Focus on your audience’s risk of the threat. Here’s an example, from Northern Fund’s marketing magazine:

Women are particularly likely to live in poverty in old age: Regardless of their current incomes, one-third to two-thirds of 25- to 55-year-old women could become destitute if they don’t start to prepare for their financial futures now.

B. Emphasize similarities between victims of the threat and the target audience:

Like you, these women had high-paying jobs in their 40s and 50s.

C. Personalize the threat. Bring it home to the reader.

Bottom line: If you’re a woman, you face a 33% chance of living in poverty after you retire.

Avoid the breaking point.

At this point, readers make a decision. If they find the threat irrelevant or insignificant, they’ll ignore your message.

But if they feel susceptible to a serious threat, they’ll start wondering what they can do about it.

That makes this the perfect time to introduce the solution.

3. Demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution.

In one Australian study, researchers found that the audience’s view of the solution outweighed the importance of the threat in the success of a fear appeal.

Call it “response efficacy” — researchers’ term for whether a person believes the solution will actually reduce the risk.

Here’s how it works:

• I believe a biochemical terrorist attack is a real, severe risk. [Severity of threat.]
• I believe I am at risk. [Personalize the risk.]
• But I don’t believe that putting duct tape around my windows is an effective solution. So I opt out. [Effectiveness of solution.]

So don’t blow this off with a one-liner: Develop this section as well as you develop the threat. Outline how, why and when the solution will reduce the risk.

4. Show that readers can perform the solution.

If readers think the solution won’t work or that they can’t implement the solution, they’ll feel it’s futile to try to control the risk.

Then they’ll focus on controlling their fear instead of the threat. They may become defensive: “This is freaking me out. I’m not going to think about it.”

For instance:

• I believe that the cost of spending years in a nursing home can devastate a family’s finances. [Severity of threat]
• I believe my own family’s finances are at risk. [Personal risk]
• I believe that long-term-care insurance would be an effective solution. [Effectiveness of solution]
• I just don’t see how I could afford long-term-care insurance premiums. [My ability to perform solution.]

So demonstrate that your action recommendations are cheap, painless and easy to implement. “Lose 40 pounds,” for instance, isn’t easy. “Substitute a liquid meal replacement for one meal a day” is more achievable.

How can you use this model to develop a four-part fear appeal that persuades, rather than paralyzing, readers.

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Sources: Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin and Robert B. Cialdini; Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Free Press, 2009

Kim Witte and Mike Allen, “A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals: Implications for Effective Public Health Campaigns,” Health Education & Behavior, October 2000

Herbert J. Rotfeld, “There are threats and (maybe) fear-caused arousal: theory and confusions of appeals to fear and fear arousal itself,” Journal of Advertising, Sept. 22, 1997

Richard Tay, Barry Watson and Olivia Radbourne, “The influence of fear arousal and perceived efficacy on the acceptance and rejection of road safety advertising message,” Road Safety Research, Policing and Education Conference (Regain the Momentum), Melbourne, 2001

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Fear appeals work.

That’s according to 100 studies and 50 years of research on fear appeals reviewed by researchers Kim Witte and Mike Allen.

Fear appeals — also known as scare tactics, shock tactics, negative messages, risk communications, threats and avoidance benefits — have a high “response efficacy,” researchers say.

In other words, a threat may be more likely to motivate behavior than a promise.

We’ve used fear appeals for decades.

Preachers, teachers, communicators and others have used fear appeals since antiquity to convince people to:

• Apply sunscreen
• Avoid drugs and alcohol
• Conduct breast self-exams
• Drive safely
• Duck and cover
• Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables
• Exercise
• Floss
• Learn self-defense techniques
• Not drink and drive
• Stop smoking
• Use condoms
• Wear seatbelts

You can use fear appeals in your persuasive messages, too, to get your readers to do everything from getting heart scans to buying long-term-care insurance to contributing to their 401(k) plans.

Consequences more powerful than benefits.

Appeals can be positive: make money, save money, save time. But sometimes negative appeals work best.

“People spend 19 times the time, effort and expense to solve a pain than to reap a benefit.”

— Chris Stiehl, “The Listening Coach”

In one extended parallel study, for instance, researchers tested two messages:

• Negative: By failing to perform breast self-examinations, you’ll be less likely to discover cancer in its early stages, so treatment will be less likely to work.
• Positive: By performing breast self-examinations, you’ll be more likely to detect breast cancer in its early stages, when it’s more treatable.

The negative version was nearly 20% more effective than the positive one at getting women to conduct breast self-exams.

So forget what your mother told you: If you can’t think of anything nice to say, say something negative. Your campaign may be more powerful.

Symptoms more powerful than cures.

Writing about symptoms may be the holy grail for health communication, according to a study by MedTrack Alert and the Interactive Media Services Program at Miami University in Ohio.

Describing the symptoms of a disease, according to the study, provides a “double hit” of:

1. Convincing customers to comply with action recommendations such as using a product or service
2. Getting people to pass the messages along through word of mouth

In fact, focusing on symptoms is more effective than focusing on:

• Gaining better control over a condition
• Experiencing a positive outcome
• Getting good results
• Saving money with a discount coupon
• Showing that the cure is easy to use
• Explaining how a drug works

“The findings here suggest that an advertisement that calls attention to the symptoms … has the most potential to be acted upon,” the researchers say.

Negative fake news gains traction.

Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landings? Was President Obama holding a rocket launcher in a car with an ISIS leader? Does your favorite shampoo cause hair loss?

No, no and probably not, according to Snopes’ “25 Hottest Urban Legends.”

So what makes bad news — even when it’s fake news — gain such traction?

It’s evolutionary, writes Matthew Hutson in The Atlantic. The more likely a message is to help us survive a threat (or find a mate), the more likely we are to believe it, remember it and share it.

1. Fear appeals are more believable. In one study, subjects ranked the sources of negative messages (leeches clinging to your feet, software frying your hard drive, meat turning bitter on the stove) as much as 287% more knowledgeable than messages about the same subjects but with neutral themes. (Pascal Boyer & Nora Parren, “Threat-Related Information Suggests Competence,” PLOS One, June 2015)

2. Fear appeals are more memorable. In another study, subjects read an urban legend, rewrote it from memory and passed it onto the next person in a sequence like the game of telephone.At the end of the chain, subjects remembered the legends that would help them survive (serial killers and spiders) or rise socially (cybersex) much better than the control information. (Joseph M. Stubbersfield, Jamshid J. Tehrani & Emma G. Flynn, “Serial Killers, Spiders and Cybersex,” British Journal of Psychology, May 2015)

3. Fear appeals get shared. When researchers analyzed 220 urban legends, they found that the stories were much more likely to mention threats than benefits. That makes sense: Evolutionarily, believing in a fake hazard is less harmful than disregarding a real one.And subjects found statements about topics ranging from German shepherds to LASIK surgery more believable when they mentioned risks, like mauling or double vision. (Daniel M. T. Fessler, Anne C. Pisor & Carlos David Navarrete, “Negatively-Biased Credulity and the Cultural Evolution of Beliefs,” PLOS One, April 2014)

Bring on the bad news.

Some 84% of executives say their communication is intentionally “optimistic.” That’s a mistake.

Indeed, research by David M. Schweiger and Yaakov Weber shows that communicating bad news as well as good decreases employees’ uncertainty and stress.

Bad news increases employees’:

• Job satisfaction
• Commitment
• Trust in the company
• Intention to stay at the company

Accentuate the negative.

Fear appeals work for getting people to do everything from duck and cover to avoid texting while driving.

How can you accentuate the negative in your next campaign?

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Sources: Kim Witte and Mike Allen, “A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals: Implications for Effective Public Health Campaigns,” Health Education & Behavior, vol. 27, no. 5, October 2000

Aaron Baar, “Drugmakers Should Focus On Symptoms, Study Finds,” Marketing Daily, Nov. 8, 2007

David M. Schweiger and Angelo S. Denisi, “Communication with Employees Following a Merger: A Longitudinal Field Experiment,” Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 24, No. 1, March 1991, pp. 110-135

Robert A. Ruiter, Bas Verplanken and Gerdien van Eersel, “Strengthening the Persuasive Impact of Fear Appeals: The Role of Action Framing,” The Journal of Social Psychology, June 2003

Matthew Hutson, “Strange Origins of Urban Legends,” The Atlantic, Dec. 8, 2015

TJ Larkin & Sandar Larkin, “Communicate the Good and the Bad,” Larkin Page No. 46, October 2006

David M. Schweiger and Yaakov Weber: “Strategies for Managing Human Resources during Mergers and Acquisitions: An Empirical Investigation,” HR – Human Resource Planning, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1989, pp. 69-86

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