In 2016 Merck launched an advertising campaign for its HPV vaccine that aroused a storm of protest and headlines. The Washington Post published an article entitled “Do the new Merck HPV ads guilt-trip parents or tell hard truths? Both.” One of Merck’s TV ads showed an adult woman diagnosed with cervical cancer and flashed back to her as a child, asking, “Did you know [there was a vaccine for HPV]—Mom, Dad?”
“I thought, ‘This is the thing that's going to make parents say I would feel horrible if my kid got cervical cancer later, and I could have vaccinated them,’” says Monique Turner, a communication scientist at Michigan State University (MSU). ”So, from a research perspective, I was like, ‘Thumbs-up, Merck.’ But they took a lot of heat for it.”
Guilt is a powerful tool. Research has shown that, wielded effectively, it can persuade people to do the right thing. In a recent analysis of 26 studies of guilt appeals, Washington State University communication scientist Wei Peng found that guilt works—if people hearing the pitch are not made to feel responsible for a bad situation. Picture asking them to help with an environmental catastrophe.
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The most straightforward pitches involve what researchers call “existential guilt,” Peng says. They rely on our internal moral code that, as a human being, we have an obligation to relieve the suffering of others if we can. “What I found is that people feel guilty about people’s suffering even if they don’t have a direct personal relationship,” Peng says, “even if they are on the other side of the world.”
It’s hard for most people to see photographs of starving children. Doing so hurts. Taking action to help them offers some relief. That’s what advocates are counting on when they ask you for donations to feed orphans or build shelters for earthquake survivors. Knowing guilt’s potential for good, social scientists are seeking the optimal formula to craft pitches for everything from promoting health behaviors and road safety to safeguarding the planet.
But getting the formula right is tricky. “We have a hardwired negativity bias to instantly pay attention to anything that arouses a negative emotion,” says Pennsylvania State University media psychologist Jessica Myrick. That’s why inflicting guilt often works. But the downside of arousing this intensely uncomfortable feeling is that people can employ a battery of defenses against it: getting angry, rationalizing or distancing from the issue.
That is the important takeaway from Peng’s research: guilt works when it doesn’t trigger resistance. In other words, don’t make listeners feel they’ve done something bad. “If you say we need to do something different versus you,” says persuasion scholar Robin Nabi of the University of California, Santa Barbara, “now you’re not the bad guy. We all have responsibility.”
There are many ways to get this wrong. For example, if messengers arouse shame rather than guilt, MSU’s Turner found, people resist more. In her research, participants were asked to read an ad urging testing for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) that evoked either guilt or shame and then to give their reactions. A headline in the guilt and shame appeals respectively asked what or who would give one’s partner an STD,” followed by multiple-choice answers. In both, the correct answer—“all of the above”—was circled at the bottom. The second-to-last option seen by both groups was objective: it referred to a person who hadn’t been tested for an STD The other multiple-choice answers were designed to evoke either guilt or shame. Those in the guilt appeal group were presented with choices such as, “someone with uninformed behavior”and “someone with forgetful behavior.” The group reading the shame appeal saw choices such as, “a selfish person” and “an irresponsible person.” Subjects in the latter group were likelier to feel angry and manipulated.
As Turner explains, pointing out problematic behavior induces guilt, but focusing on someone’s inherent character traits—selfishness, for example—can induce shame. In most contexts, making people feel ashamed is not a good persuader.
The key to making a guilt pitch succeed is to offer people relief from the guilt they’re feeling. In humanitarian appeals, people are usually offered easy-to-accomplish solutions: save the puppies from being euthanized by donating or volunteering, for instance. For health or safety messages, taking action may be harder, making messaging more challenging.
If you’re asking parents to shield their kids from asthma risk from secondhand smoke, for example, saying, “Just quit” may be too hard for them. It is more effective, Nabi says, if you give people options: “Just smoke outside or not around your kids” or “Cut down how much you smoke.” “The idea is that when you evoke this emotion and then you give people a sense of efficacy,” she says, “it’s actually hope evoking.”
That’s what scientists are finding in the lab. Adding a feel-good emotion to a guilt appeal—hope or pride, for example—works better. For one thing, it reduces people’s defensiveness, and that’s the first step: make sure they don’t shut you out. One recent study tested the effect of building hope into guilt appeals in a campaign to reduce texting while driving, which is an urgent safety issue because laws and enforcement have done little to reduce crashes tied to texting.
In the online experiment, about 400 people were randomly placed in four groups. The first two groups viewed identical posters except that one added a hopeful message. The headline in both read, “You are never alone on the road.”The posters acknowledged how tempting it was to answer a text but noted that texting while driving was a factor in 20 percent of crashes. The “hope” message added recommendations to “turn on drive mode or silence your phone” and noted that doing so “can save lives.” In two other groups, people read what were essentially the same guilt-invoking or hopeful messages except that the language was more intense. The top headline, for example, read, “What you don’t see is a long and lovely life.” Adding the hopeful message reduced targets’ defensive responses in both language intensity groups. It also increased their stated intentions to avoid texting while driving.
One new study on guilt messaging tested the effect of inducing empathy alongside guilt in a hypothetical public-service campaign to reduce plastic bag pollution in oceans. In this online experiment, 257 college students were randomly assigned to read one of four messages from a fictional Facebook page, “Save the Marine Animals Foundation,” asking them to reduce their plastic bag use. In half the groups the undergraduates were asked to take the perspective of an animal suffering from ingesting a plastic bag. Researchers found that adopting the animals’ viewpoint created empathy. More empathy was associated with more guilt, which was, in turn, correlated with an increase in participants’ intentions to cut down on plastic bag use.
In some appeals to protect the environment, inducing pride along with guilt proves to be the winning recipe for persuading people to change their behavior. In a meta-analysis of 30 years of research, data scientist Nathan Shipley, then at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, zeroed in on campaigns that induce people to imagine they’ll feel guilty or proud of themselves depending on their future behavior. He found that both emotions correlated with subjects’ intended and reported pro-environmental behavior, but the pride relationship was stronger.
The success of these efforts depends at least partly on how well a message is tailored to a specific audience. Undergraduates in these studies, for example, are typically more environmentally conscious than their parents. The results in a new study showed that for Generation Z restaurant diners, both anticipated guilt for eating less environmentally sustainable food and an anticipated pride for eating more environmentally friendly, plant-based foods influenced their intentions to eat at chain restaurants that offered nonmeat options.
Another study tested whether mothers of young children were more susceptible than others to guilt appeals to switch to buying organic food. The researchers found that they were. That’s not surprising, says Myrick, who is a mother of three kids under the age of five. Myrick is bombarded with guilt appeals. She’s had to triage the things she feels guilty about, such as using disposable diapers and paper plates, because, she says, “I’d feel even more guilty if I didn’t feed my kids something even when I don’t have time to prepare food.”
Another study measured neither pride nor guilt, but both may have been implicitly invoked, says Elizabeth Hewitt, a social scientist at Stony Brook University and lead author of the paper. Over 12 weeks in two next-door apartment buildings in New York City, experimenters posted signs in the trash rooms every week announcing how well each building had done in recycling efforts. The sign in one building compared the amount of much of plastic, metal and glass its residents had recycled during the previous week with how much they had recycled the week before. The sign in the other building compared the amount its residents recycled in the previous week with how much their neighbors recycled during the same period. Both buildings increased their recycling by bag weight, but the feedback that compared residents with their neighbors resulted in more recycled material. Although the mechanism operated through peer pressure, guilt can play a role if a person feels they are not doing as much as they should, Hewitt says. Surpassing your neighbors can trigger pride.
This swell of research is both timely and necessary, scientists say. Left to our own devices, we are not always our best selves—or our own best friends. Persuasive public service messaging will need to be crafted for new generations. Take the campaigns for the HPV vaccine. Over 20 years, they were a factor in reducing HPV infections in teenage girls by 88 percent and in young adult women by 81 percent. Yet vaccination rates in the U.S. remain lower than in other countries, and rates are uneven across the U.S., leaving many vulnerable to preventable cancers. To address such problems, it remains urgent to find effective tools of persuasion. Guilt, massaged in the right ways, can be a powerful tool.