“Instilling Fear fails”
When you Want To Make a Big Behavioral Change in Your Market
The major mistake that most people do when they try to change the behaviour of others is to emphasize the downturn of the current behaviour.
We all share this deep-rooted belief that if you threaten people and fear is induced, it will get them to act. It seems like a really reasonable assumption, except for the fact that science shows that warnings have a very limited impact on changing behaviour.
Waring has a limited impact
The picture in the cigarettes box does not deter smokers from smoking. One study found that after looking at those images, quitting actually became a lower priority for smokers.
I'm not saying that warnings and frets never worked, but what I'm saying is that on average, they seem to have a very limited impact.
So the question is, why we are resistant to warnings?
People try to avoid negative information about their current behaviour especially if it will happen in the future
Well, if you think about animals, when you induce fear in an animal, the most common responses you will see are freezing or flying. You don’t see fighting as much. Humans are the same.
Take the stock market. For example, do you know when people pull their head out of the ground to look at their accounts, not to make a transaction just to log in to check their account? The data showed when the market is high people log in all the time because positive information makes you feel good. So, they seek it out. However, when the market is low people avoid logging in because negative information makes them feel bad. So they try to avoid this information altogether as long as bad information can be reasonably avoided.
People might tell themselves, what's the point of worrying about something that might happen and it might not . They think there are different routes from thier present to thier future .
All of this show that the fear strategy most of the time fails. At its best, it could change behaviours for short time and then the original behaviours rebound. The fear strategy is built on creating fear in the mind of a person, but this person adopts mechanisms to downplay the risk and stay on their coarse.
People are more engaged with positive information than negative events.
To Motivate change you need to think differently. Fear results in inaction but the thrill of the game induce actions and changes can be seen. To change behaviour we need to try positive strategies by emphasizing on the immediate gains of adopting the new behaviour rather than threats of the negative consequences of the current one. By doing so, we capitalize on the human tendency to progress.
