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CHAPTER 12
Fear Appeals
Paul A. Mongeau
The half-life of social science theory and research is notoriously short. Scholars have a seemingly insatiable need to focus on new, different, and unique ideas, even if they represent old wine in new academic skins. The study of persuasion, however, seems immune to this short attention span. This may be because the nature of attitudes; how they are shaped, reinforced, and changed; and how they are (un) related to behaviors are, relatively speaking, less strongly influenced by social and cultural changes. As a consequence, the social scientific study of many persuasion theories and concepts has relatively long histories. What is more, the study of fear appeals is among the oldest in all such persuasion research.
The chapter’s primary goal is to review social science fear appeals theory and research. Despit
e considerable uncertainty in the early years, general conclusions of the effectiveness of fear appeals have become more optimistic in the past few decades. Fear appeals work, at least for most audiences and most contexts. Disagreements abound, however, concerning why fear appeals work (and why they don’t). I will conclude that one reason that this is the case is that the explanations have not been given a fair test. Therefore, this chapter will spend more time considering explanations than the actual research. Before doing so, two fundamental issues—the nature of emotions and the nature of fear appeals—are considered.
Emotions and Persuasion
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There is a general consensus that emotions are an amalgam of cognitive, physiological, and behavioral elements (Bradley & Lang, 2000; Nabi, 2002; Shiota & Kalat, 2011). The relative importance of these elements in the production of emotion, however, has been the source of considerable disagreement (e.g., Zajonc, 1980, versus Lazarus, 1982). Cognitively based views of emotions tend to ignore physiological processes (e.g., Witte, 1992). Psychophysiological views of emotion, on the other hand, largely ignore cognition and typically consider emotion to be identifiable solely from physiological measures (e.g., Williams et al., 2001). Although it is important to integrate, and truly balance, physiological, behavioral, and cognitive elements in the production and effects of emotion (Bradley & Lang, 2000), actually finding scholarship that actually does so is rare.
The persuasion literature generally considers emotions from a cognitive perspective (Nabi, 2002). Given this focus, emotions have four particularly useful characteristics (Guerrero, Andersen, & Trost, 1998). First, emotions involve a rapid cognitive evaluation of environmental changes. The emotion of fear, for example, necessitates identifying a threat to health and well-being (e.g., Leventhal, 1970). Second, emotions reflect an affective evaluation of the environmental change. Changes that reflect positively on health and well-being generally generate positive emotions (e.g., joy or love), while environmental changes that reflect poorly on us likely generate negative emotions (e.g., jealousy or fear). Third, even from a cognitive perspective, there is an understanding that emotions involve physiological responses. Finally, and most relevant to persuasion, emotions have a behavioral component; that is, “The primary function of emotion is to guide behavior” (Dillard & Meijnders, 2002, p. 318).
Defining Fear, Threat, and Fear Appeals
Given this view of emotions, it is important to define fear and associated terms. Witte defined fear as “a negatively-valenced emotion accompanied by a high level of arousal and is elicited by a threat that is perceived to be significant and personally relevant” (Witte, 1992, p. 331; see also Easterling & Leventhal, 1989). This definition highlights three important points. First and most simply, fear is an emotion. Second, the experience of fear involves, by definition, physiological arousal (e.g., increases in heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure as well as pupil dilation and releases of adrenaline; Guerrero et al., 1998). Thus, an approach to fear appeals that ignores physiology is missing an important element of the emotional process. Finally, Witte’s (1992) definition suggests an important link between fear and threat. I consider this distinction and its implications for the construction of fear appeals next.
Despite important differences between fear and threat, these terms have been used synonymously throughout the history of fear appeals (Witte, 1992; see, for example, Hovland, Janis, & Kelly, 1953). Fear is an internal characteristic, that is, a negative emotion that is thought to intervene between fear appeals and responses (Hovland et al., 1953; Witte, 1992). Threat, on the other hand, is an environmental characteristic that represents something that portends negative consequences for the individual. Thus, messages depict a threat, that when processed by the receiver, creates fear.
The distinction between fear and threat has clear implications for the construction of fear appeals. According to Rogers (1975, 1983 and most scholars that followed), fear appeals contain two parts: a threat component and a coping component. Each of these components is further subdivided into two parts. First, fear appeals depict an environmental threat to recipients’ health and well-being. In most fear appeal manipulations, the depicted threat to well-being is physical (e.g., second-hand smoke causes cancer). More specifically, through intense verbal text often (but not necessarily) accompanied by vivid graphics (e.g., gruesome photographs), researchers typically manipulate the threat’s severity (e.g., lack of adequate dental hygiene cases great pain from toothaches, mouth infections, decayed teeth and painful trips to the dentist; Janis & Feshbach, 1953). The second threat component is susceptibility (or vulnerability) that indicates that the environmental threat is likely to strike unless preventative action is taken (e.g., painful outcomes will occur unless message recommendations are followed; Janis & Feshbach).
Fear appeals initially depict a threat to the receivers’ health and/or well-being. This message component, according to some (but not all) fear appeal explanations, generates the emotion of fear in the audience members (e.g., Hovland et al., 1953; Witte, 1992). For a fear appeal to be persuasive (i.e., generate responses in the direction of message recommendations), however, it must also indicate how audience members can avoid the threat. Therefore, the second fear appeal component is the coping component (Rogers, 1975, 1983; Witte, 1992) that includes both response efficacy and self-efficacy information. First, response efficacy represents “the availability and effectiveness of a coping response that might reduce or eliminate the noxious stimulus” (Rogers, 1975, p. 97). Second, self-efficacy represents the extent to which the recipient has the ability to perform the recommended behavior (Rogers, 1983). Self-efficacy is important, for example, in the case of smoking cessation. A tobacco smoker might understand that smoking dramatically increases the probability of contracting several nasty diseases (high perceived noxiousness and vulnerability) and that smoking cessation reduces those probabilities (high perceived response efficacy). If the recipient, however, considers smoking an addiction, a lack of self-efficacy would likely interfere with enacting the recommended coping behavior. In short, current thinking suggests that in order to be effective, fear appeals must not only depict a serious and imminent threat, but must also provide the individual with a way of avoiding that threat.
Do Fear Appeals Work?
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The social scientific study of fear appeals begins, for all intents and purposes, with Janis and Feshbach’s (1953) seminal investigation (also described in Hovland et al., 1953). In their study, they presented the entire freshman class of large Connecticut high school (in intact classrooms) with minimal, moderate, or strong fear appeals concerning dental hygiene (i.e., proper tooth brushing technique and equipment) or a control message. Their results indicated that as the strength of the fear appeal increased, behavior change in the week following message reception decreased. In short, they reported a negative linear relationship between fear appeals and behavior change.
As in other cases where an initial study generates counterintuitive results (e.g., LaPiere, 1934), considerable fear appeal research ensued over the next two decades. Most studies during this time generated positive linear relationships between fear appeals and attitude and behavior change. On the other hand, some studies from that era (i.e., Goldstein, 1959; Janis & Terwilliger, 1962; Leventhal & Watts, 1966) were consistent with Janis & Feshbach’s (1953) results (i.e., a negative linear relationships between fear appeal strength and attitude change).
When I began reading the fear appeal literature in the early 1980s, reviews typically included wailing and gnashing of teeth as authors described incongruous and confusing results (e.g., Smith, 1982). This confusion stemmed, in large part, from the contradictory results among those early fear appeal studies. Over the past three decades, reviewers of the fear appeal literature have become more positive. Early meta-analyses (Boster & Mongeau, 1984; Sutton, 1982) suggested that the literature was not as confusing or as scattered as the previous reviews suggested. In addition, an importa
nt methodological milestone in clarifying the effects of fear appeals is Rogers’s (1975, 1983) explication of the fear appeal manipulation (described earlier). A large majority of performed studies after Rogers’ clarification of the structure of fear appeals report positive linear relationship between the strength of a fear appeal and message acceptance (see Witte & Allen, 2000).
Recent meta-analyses (e.g., Witte & Allen, 2000) indicate that the accumulated research clearly suggests that fear-arousing messages work, at least for most audiences and on most occasions. (This caveat is an important one that will be discussed later in the chapter.) In summarizing their meta-analytic results, Witte and Allen conclude:
In sum, the stronger the fear appeal, the greater the attitude, intention and behavior changes. Similarly, the stronger the severity and susceptibility in the message, the more attitude, intention, and behavior changes. Finally, the stronger the response efficacy and self-efficacy in a message, the stronger the attitudes, intentions, and behaviors toward the recommended response. (p. 598)
Fear Appeal Explanations
* * *
Over the past several decades, several explanations attempted to elucidate fear appeals successes and failures. Therefore, this section describes and evaluates five historically important approaches to fear appeals: the drive model (Hovland et al., 1953), the parallel response model (Leventhal, 1970), the protection motivation explanation (Rogers, 1975, 1983), the extended parallel processing model (Witte, 1992), and the stage model (Stroebe, 2000). These explanations reflect predominant contemporary social science paradigms. In the 1950s and 1960s, the predominant explanation (the drive model; e.g., Hovland et al., 1953; Janis, 1967; McGuire, 1969) reflected classical condition and learning paradigms. Through the 1970s and beyond, as the cognitive revolution challenged, and eventually superseded, the reinforcement paradigm (G. A. Miller, 2003), fear appeal explanations quickly followed suit. During this time, fear appeal explanations swung from entirely emotion and reinforcement-based, to presenting a balance between emotion and cognitive foci, to finally becoming entirely cognitive (and, thus, representing threat appeal explanations as previously defined), where consideration of emotion processes waned. It is only relatively recently that the emotion of fear has returned to the study of fear appeals, but only from a cognitive perspective.
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