Broadly Meaning:

We’ve all heard that you can’t change someone else, “they have to make the decision to change themselves.” (Quote attributed to every Mom ever.)

It’s difficult, it’s annoying, it’s unfortunate, but it usually seems to be the case.

This is such a pity, because there are so many situations in which changing someone else would be so beneficial.

Just think about it: What if we could just change terrorists into dentists?

Oh wait, they’re pretty much the same thing anyway. Those bastards never use enough Novocaine (dentists). But you know what I’m saying.

It is possible, however, to make people feel certain emotions that will make them want to change, or at least prompt them to do something.

For years, advertisers have been using the strategy of making people feel envious in order to compel them to purchase specific products.

Public service announcements have been trying to appeal to emotion, as well. They figure there must be an emotion to get someone to stop smoking marijuana/smoking cigarettes/binge drinking/committing racial genocide/drinking and driving.

The first thing that comes to many PSA producers’ minds is “make them feel like sh*t about themselves.”

It’s a pretty common occurrence on television. If you’ve ever seen that commercial where the guy forgets to pick up his adorable little brother because he was high, then you know this is true.

“Hey older brother, I sat in the freezing rain for seven hours because you smoked weed.”

Ah, so sad.

However, science shows that this is probably not the best way to make people change. Science is useful like that.

A new study out of Northwestern University and published in the Journal of Marketing Research shows that anti-drinking ads intended to shame or guilt drinkers into cutting back on consumption actually result in more drinking on the part of targeted individuals.

The five-part study looked at around 1,200 undergraduate students’ responses to common anti-drinking messages, focusing on ones that employed shame or guilt as a rhetorical strategy.

In an interview with National Public Radio, Lead Researcher Nidhi Agrawal said, “We wanted to study what makes ads effective or makes them backfire. And what our research shows is that well-intended anti-drinking messages can actually cause people to drink more. They’re not just ineffective and wasting money, but could actually be causing harm.”

People respond to feelings of guilt about drinking by drinking more because of something Agrawal calls “defensive processing.”

“When we feel guilt, it’s because we messed up,” Agrawal said. “No one wants to believe that. We all want to believe we’re amazing people. Which is why, when you get people to feel guilty or ashamed, they want to defend against those feelings. They have the incentive to show that they can handle it – they can drink and they won’t mess up … they feel even more entitled to have a drink.”

This catch-22 is likely present in feelings of shame or guilt about other things too, notably common PSA targets, cigarette smoking and drug use.

But if evoking guilt in those you want to make a change won’t work, what will?

Agrawal, also in his NPR interview, said that if we’re going to try to help someone make a change, we “should be very careful about using very powerful emotional tactics – when we use guilt or shame, or even sadness or anger. We have to have a carrot to go with the stick: It’s OK to mess up; you can handle it; here’s how.”

Now, I hate to sound like I’m handing down life lessons here, but there has to be something to be learned from this.

There’s too much negativity surrounding these things. Certainly binge drinking and cigarette smoking are culturally taboo and dangerous, but just hitting people over the head with “you’re going to die” and “you look like an idiot when you do that” is not going to make someone want to change.

Let’s all just get a little bit more positive here.

It’s like that old Aesop’s fable, “The North Wind and The Sun,” (ahh ahh! Don’t touch it, I already claimed it for a band name.).

You know the one: the wind and the sun are in a contest to see who is more powerful, and then they see a man walking down a road wearing a cloak.

The wind blows really hard to try to rip the cloak off of him, but the harder the wind blows, the man clings tighter and tighter to the cloak.

Sun, on its turn, just shines down warmth and light, and the man soon finds that he is too hot to wear the cloak any longer.

The moral: “kindness effects more than severity.”