Ethics vs. Effectiveness with fear appeal in Public service announcements
Recently, within modern advertising, the use of emotional appeal has been an issue of growing interest in both the advertising industry as well as the consumer public. Questions have arisen regarding the reason for its use and its ethical boundaries. Playing on the emotions of the general consumer public through advertising is considered by many to be very unethical. Furthermore, the advertising industry has started a trend that involves playing on the emotions of the consumer, specifically the emotion of fear. Obviously, in an effort to try and sell a certain product, it would have to be considered at least somewhat unethical to use consumer emotion as a means to sell that product. However, there is another form of advertising that has noticed the effects of emotional appeal, and now it too has followed suit. This other branch is known as the "Public Service Announcement." Public Service Announcements, or PSAs are not for profit messages for the benefit of the gene!ral public. The purpose of individual PSAs can range from an anti-drug c
In addition to these statistics, it is estimated that seat belts reduce the risk of fatal injury to front-seat occupants by 45% and the risk of serious injury by 50%. Latour, Michael S., Robin L. Snipes and Sara J. Bliss. Don't be Afraid to Use Fear Appeals: An Experimental Study. Journal of Advertising Research. March 1996. g, "it must follow that fear is caused by whatever seems to have a great power of destroying us or of working injuries that are likely to bring us great pain." In the PSA, the 'great power of destroying us' is the car that hits us when we are not wearing our seat belts causing injury or possibly death. In Aristotle on Emotions and Rational Persuasion, it states that "emotions are forms of intentional awareness: that is, they are forms of awareness directed at or about an object, in which the object figures as it is seen from the creature's point of view." In this case, the object is injury or death while the creature is the listener. Again, this is merely making the listener aware of the possibility of death, triggering the emotion of fear. The article goes further in saying, "Let fear be, then, a certain sort of pain and disturbance out of the appearance of an impending bad thing either destructive or painful...It is necessary that those things are fearful that appear to h! In a study that compared positive and negative appeals, B.R. Reeves examined whether attention and memory are better for negative or positive images in Public Service Announcements about health. He claimed that in most studies, people are typically asked to recall life experiences and depending on which experiences were chosen, the study could determine whether it is more of the negative or more of the positive that sticks out in a person's mind. This was claimed "biased toward selective memory rather that toward memory dependent of the intensity of processing (Reeves 1991)." The results of the study by Reeves concluded that recognition was better for radio/audio from negative PSAs than from positive. It went on to say that "the memory results are consistent with other media studies, and consequently, we are relatively confident in the memory advantage for negative messages (Reeves 1991)." Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Aristotle on Emotions and Rational Persuasion. Princeton University, 1994. The seat belt PSA that was chosen does use negative emotion triggering circumstances of action for survival threat of death or injury when involved in a car accident without wearing a seat belt. We have also established that in advertising, it is considered unethical to use human emotion as a means to sell. However, in the case of saving lives during a Public Service Announcements, it could be possible that though it too may be unethical, there is no scientific way to prove the ethics behind it. However, there is, as has been shown, hard scientific evidence that proves the effectiveness in the use of fear appeal and memory cognition and response. Th
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Approximate Word count = 2004
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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