Scare tactics

Australian public health campaigns rely heavily on scare tactics. The commercials warning about the dangers of smoking, crystal meth, too much sun exposure, and binge drinking are at times downright horrific. The other day, the "everybody knows" anti-smoking commercial came on while Gus was in the room and I made him close his eyes through all of it just to make sure he wouldn't have nightmares that night. Here's a link to the commercial, but I'm warning you - if you have a weak stomach, don't follow the link!

Interestingly, for any public health geeks out there, there was a famous campaign in the late 80s, called the "grim reaper campaign". And if you talk to Australians, they all remember these commercials and will swear to you that the campaign was incredibly successful and resulted in Australia's current low HIV rates, at least among heterosexuals. I have no idea if that's the case or not. I do have a vague memory from a course I took ages ago (in psychology? sociology? public health?) that scare tactics do not work in changing people's behaviour, it just grosses them out. But, I don't know...I think I'd be giving up the smokes pretty quickly after I saw some of those images in the "everybody knows" commercials. Also, someone recently made the point that if nothing else, these commercials are good at getting people to talk about these issues. This much, I can vouch for!