[Sinner]

Originally Posted by theknife

there's a sucker born every minute

If you mean floyd I could not agree more.

Not sure what your point is on the fear thing tho, It is used everyday by almost all corporations and govenerment levels. Hell ABC uses fear factors to get you to watch their news. "Kids Go Missing" at a 11:00.

-A television commercial portrays a terrible automobile accident (the fear appeal), and reminds viewers to wear their seat-belts (the fear-reducing behavior).

-A pamphlet from an insurance company includes pictures of houses destroyed by floods (the fear appeal), and follows up with details about home-owners' insurance (the fear-reducing behavior).

-A letter from a pro-gun organization begins by describing a lawless America in which only criminals own guns (the fear appeal), and concludes by asking readers to oppose a ban on automatic weapons (the fear-reducing behavior).

"All other things being equal, the more frightened a person is by a communication, the more likely her or she is to take positive preventive action."(Pratkanis and Aronson, 1991)

Fear appeals will not succeed in altering behavior if the audience feels powerless to change the situation.

Fear appeals are more likely to succeed in changing behavior if they contain specific recommendations for reducing the threat that the audience believes are both effective and doable.

In summary, there are four elements to a successful fear appeal: 1) a threat, 2) a specific recommendation about how the audience should behave, 3) audience perception that the recommendation will be effective in addressing the threat, and 4) audience perception that they are capable of performing the recommended behavior.

When fear appeals do not include all four elements, they are likely to fail. Pratkanis and Aronson provide the example of the anti-nuclear movement, which successfully aroused public fear of nuclear war, but offered few specific recommendations that people perceived as effective or doable. By contrast, fall-out shelters were enormously popular during the 1950s because people believed that shelters would protect them from nuclear war, and installing a shelter was something that they could do.

In a similar fashion, during the 1964 campaign, Lyndon Johnson was said to have swayed many voters with a well-known television commercial that portrayed a young girl being annihilated in a nuclear blast. This commercial linked nuclear war to Barry Goldwater (Johnson's opponent), and proposed a vote for Johnson as an effective, doable way of avoiding the threat.