When is Fear-Based Communication Appropriate?
By Destiny Aman, JPoint Strategic Design SME & CEO
One topic that comes up a lot here at JPoint Collaborative, is which strategies work best for motivating action. Since we specialize in communicating around risk, disaster, disruption, and change – situations where there may be real consequences for inaction – fear-based approaches come up a lot. It’s understandable – public officials and others know what can happen if folks don’t act. They want the public to understand this risk and make decisions accordingly.
However. Communicating with the public always involves power dynamics – reflecting who has access to information, who doesn’t, who is trying to make someone else do something they wouldn’t otherwise do, and why? These power dynamics can really complicate things. Fear-based communication is a great example of this. A trusted authority figure flexing how scary something is can be extremely effective in motivating action. But if trust isn’t there, or is shaky, or the relationship is unfamiliar, it can put an unpredictable dynamic in play and can lead to unpredictable outcomes.
As Hurricane Helene made its way to the southeast US in late September, social media was abuzz with all kinds of warnings about the storm, many of them fear-based.
Creators on TikTok made videos that seemed tailor-made to create a healthy respect for the then Category 4 storm and encourage people to evacuate. One popular message was around the Waffle House Index. Waffle House has a robust set of strategies for staying open during disasters, so much so that now people judge the severity of a disaster by whether nearby Waffle Houses are open as usual, running a limited menu with the use of generators, or closed. The common wisdom being, if Waffle House is closed, you need to get out of dodge, yesterday. So creators were showing boarded up Waffle Houses along the expected path of the hurricane as a way to warn viewers to evacuate if they hadn’t already, hoping the seriousness of seeing a closed Waffle House would motivate them to evacuate.
Another category of video (like this one and this one) centered around notices from the Taylor County Sherriff’s Office instructing residents who weren’t planning on evacuating to write their names and important information on their arms or legs in permanent marker so their bodies can be more easily identified, the message being, if you don’t evacuate, you’re not going to survive. Both this grisly warning and the Waffle House videos are prime examples of fear-based communication in a disaster situation. Given the severity of the storm and the strain likely to be put on emergency workers in a situation like this, attempting the print version of shaking someone while yelling ‘get out!!!’ is understandable. The real question is, does this work? Well, it depends.
According to this meta-analysis of studies on fear-based approaches, they absolutely can be effective, but there are some notable caveats: fear-based messaging was found to be most effective on people with high self-efficacy, women, and when there was an upcoming, single event where behavior needed to change. This paper on using intervention mapping to find better alternatives to fear-based communication also notes that in groups with low self-efficacy, such messages create a defensive reaction rather than positive change.
Based on these papers, the kinds of fear-based communication that peppered social media in the days leading up to Hurricane Helene may have actually been effective with some groups – a boarded-up Waffle House is pretty unsettling! It’s also, conveniently, a message without a messenger – one that doesn’t require a traditional authority figure that might incite defensive reactions in people. It’s very locally and culturally-specific. A Waffle House closure surely wouldn’t have the same effect on the West Coast (perhaps an In-N-Out Burger?). This highlights the importance of a communications strategy that is based in the local context and environment.
The other factor worth mentioning here is that of timing. It’s clear from both research and from our own experience in disaster communication that this kind of intensely fear-based communication is best deployed as a last resort, especially when the external environment is confirming the risk (ex: there is smoke in the air, etc.). What’s more effective is ongoing, long-term communication to groups in disaster-prone areas that help increase their self-efficacy, so that when disaster strikes, they trust the public authorities, and they feel ready and able to make the safest and best choice. It’s not as snappy as a TikTok video, but the results are longer lasting.
