So, just like the Tide Pod Challenge, to reestablish a sense of autonomy, people often react against persuasion. They do the opposite of whatever is being requested.I Want me to buy a hybrid? No, thanks, I’ll get a gas guzzler instead. Want me to save money for retirement? I’ll show you. I’ll buy whatever I want!9 Pushing, telling, or just encouraging people to do something often makes them less likely to do it.
Reactance even happens when people had wanted to do what was suggested in the first place. Take a new workplace initiative to get people to speak up in meetings. Some people may want to speak up already, so the initiative should be an easy sell. People want to speak up; the company wants people to speak up; everybody wins.
But if the initiative crowds out people’s ability to see their behavior as internally or freely driven, it can backfire. Someone who is thinking of speaking up now has an alternate explanation for that thought: that they’re doing so not because they want to but because the initiative told them to. It interferes with their ability to see their decisions as their own. And if they don’t want to feel like they’re just going along with a directive, they might end up staying silent.
Just as a missile defense system protects a country against incoming projectiles, people have anti-persuasion radar. An innate anti-influence system that shields them from being swayed. They’re constantly scanning the environment for influence attempts, and when they detect one, they deploy a set of countermeasures.10 Responses that help them avoid being persuaded.
The simplest countermeasure is avoidance, or just ignoring the message. Leaving the room during a commercial, hanging up on a sales call, or shutting a pop-up window. Shoppers avoid salespeople and online shoppers avoid looking at banner ads. The more a commercial seems like it’s trying to persuade people, the more likely they are to change the channel. By reducing exposure to incoming communication, its potential impact is weakened.
The more complex (and effortful) response is counterarguing. Rather than just ignoring the message, people actively contest it or work to combat it.
Take a message from Ford about its F-150 Truck: “CLASS-LEADING CAPABILITY… The Ford F-150 outperforms every other truck in its class when hauling cargo in the bed or towing a trailer. No wonder the competition is always in a scramble to follow the leader.”
Rather than taking the message at face value, people contest its contents and source, scrutinizing the claims and arguing against them. Does the F-150 really have class-leading capability? Of course Ford would say that: they’re trying to convince people to buy it. I bet Chevrolet says the same thing. Notice how they don’t just say “outperforms every other truck.” They qualify it with “in its class” and “when hauling cargo in the bed or towing a trailer.” I wonder if it always outperforms the other trucks or only in a small set of specific situations. And what does “outperform” mean, anyway?
Like an overzealous high school debate team, people refute each claim and undermine the source. They poke and prod and raise objections until the message comes crumbling down.
Allow for Agency
To avoid reactance and the persuasion radar, then, catalysts allow for agency. They stop trying to persuade and instead get people to persuade themselves.
After Chuck Wolfe met with the governor, he put together a team to drive Florida’s teen anti-smoking program.
The team knew that traditional advertising wouldn’t work. Teens were savvy enough to know when someone was trying to convince them.
And they knew that health information by itself wouldn’t solve the problem. It wasn’t like teens thought smoking was healthy. Teens knew it was bad for them and they were doing it anyway.
So what was left?
After discussing various directions, Wolfe’s team landed on a devastatingly simple idea. Something that had never been done before.
They stopped telling kids what to do.
For decades, adults had been telling kids not to smoke. Smoking is bad. Cigarettes will kill you. Stay away from them. Again and again and again.
Other public health campaigns had taken similar approaches.
Sure, there was some variation. Some appeals emphasized health (“Don’t smoke: it will kill you”) while others focused on vanity (“Don’t smoke: it will give you yellow teeth”). Some highlighted athletics (“Don’t smoke: it will make you worse at sports”), while others focused on peers (“Don’t smoke: you’ll get left out”).
But, regardless of flavor or style, the subtext was the same. Whether explicit or not, there was always a request, demand, or suggested action: We know what’s best for you and you should behave accordingly.
And it wasn’t working.
So rather than assuming they had the answers, Wolfe’s team asked teens for their perspective. In March 1998 they convened a Teen Tobacco Summit, where students came together to talk about and understand the problem.
And rather than tell teens smoking was bad, Chuck and the organizers let the teens take the lead. All the organizers did was lay out the facts: how the tobacco industry used manipulation and influence to sell cigarettes; how companies manipulated the political system and used sports, television, and movies to make smoking seem aspirational. Here is what the industry is doing, they said. You tell us what you want to do about it.
Many things came out of that summit. A new statewide organization called Students Working Against Tobacco, or SWAT, was formed to coordinate youth empowerment efforts. Workbooks were created to bring information about the tobacco industry into the classroom (e.g., if a carton of cigarettes generates $2 of profit, how much money would a tobacco executive make if they sold fourteen cartons of cigarettes?). And a different approach to media was formulated.
Take one of the first “truth” ads that ran soon after. Two regular teens, sitting in their regular-looking living room, call a magazine executive to ask why the publication accepted tobacco advertising, given they have a youth readership.
The executive says the magazine supports anti-tobacco ads, but when one of the teens asks whether the magazine would run some as a public service, the executive says no. When asked why not, he says, “We’re in this business to make money.” When the other teen asks, “Is this about people or about money?” the executive responds incredulously. “Publishing is about money,” he says before quickly hanging up.
That’s it.
The ad didn’t demand anything from teens. There was no message at the end telling them not to smoke, what to do, or what would or wouldn’t make them cool. The spot just let them know that, whether they realized it or not, cigarette companies were trying to influence them—and that the media was in on it. Rather than trying to persuade, the messages simply laid out the truth and left it up to teens to decide.
And decide they did.
* * *
In just a few months, the “truth campaign,” as the program came to be known, led more than 30,000 Florida teens to quit smoking.11 Within a couple years it cut teen smoking rates in half. It was the most effective large-scale prevention program. Ever.
The pilot program quickly became a worldwide model for youth tobacco control. When a national foundation was formed to eliminate teen smoking, it adopted Florida’s strategy and converted “truth” into a national campaign. And it hired Chuck Wolfe to come on as its executive vice president.