Lifelines
Irish Times – Monday, May 31, 1999
By Sarah Marriott
Do shock tactics for health campaigns work? No – according to researchers at the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford, who have found they have the opposite effect. The three unwanted effects are: warning fatigue (people pay no attention to health messages); risk factor phobia (people over-react to health warnings); and forbidden fruit effect (particularly common among teenagers, who defy authoritarian health warnings). Warning fatigue is illustrated by the failure of campaigns to encourage people to exercise more and give up smoking, while risk factor phobics over-reacted to reports of health risks linked to the contraceptive pill, and stopped taking the pill (resulting in a 9 per cent rise in the abortion rate in the UK).
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