“Disease mongering exploits the deepest atavistic fears of suffering and death,” writes Iona Heath. It also exploits the desire for happiness and social acceptance. The result is a neat emotional symmetry. Without our product, you will experience fear, disease, rejection, death; with it, you will have joy, vitality, acceptance, life. It’s hard to imagine a better way to rouse Gut and open a customer’s wallet.
An obvious question is whether pharmaceutical companies, security companies, and all the others who use fear and hope to press our psychological buttons fully understand what they are doing. Did they just stumble on this by trial and error? Or have they learned from the scientific advances of the last thirty years and put them into practice? There’s plenty of reason to think the latter is closer to the truth.
As far back as the 1970s, marketing researchers were discussing brands and the emotions that make them potent. At that point, a few pioneering psychologists had begun delving into the two-system—Head and Gut— model of human thought, and research on the role of emotion in decision-making had begun. But it would be a decade or more before these became hot topics in psychology and at least another ten years before they became predominant ways of thinking about thinking. And yet at least one industry was taking notes and drawing conclusions long ago.
“I was given some marketing documents from the tobacco industry going back twenty or thirty years,” says Paul Slovic, who was hired in 2001 as an expert witness in a lawsuit brought by the U.S. government against Big Tobacco. “It was stunning. It was shocking. Consultants for the tobacco companies were doing studies and reporting the results, and basically they were twenty years ahead of many of the cognitive and social psychologists in understanding the importance of affect. They basically had a good understanding of this concept of System One [Gut] thinking and the importance of images to which positive feelings are attached. And that was the basis of all of their advertising.”
Amos Tversky once joked that he and other scientists investigating how people make decisions were merely catching up with “advertisers and used car salesmen.” He had no idea how right he was.
What Big Tobacco figured out decades ago is surely understood today by the other major industries profiting from fear, for the integration of leading-edge psychological research with corporate marketing is itself a booming industry. In marketing journals and trade publications, the breakthroughs Kahneman and Tversky revealed in their famous 1974 paper—the Example Rule, the Rule of Typical Things, and the Anchoring Rule—are common knowledge, and the expanding scientific research on the role emotion plays in decision-making is followed with all the passion of a banker monitoring Wall Street.
Many business school professors with training in cognitive psychology operate private consultancies and charge corporate clients fat fees to apply the latest science to product launches and promotions. They include Gerald Zaltman, a marketing professor at the Harvard Business School, fellow at Harvard’s Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative, and author of How Customers Think. Corporations should treat the unconscious mind as the frontier of business, Zaltman writes. “Most influences on consumer behavior reside at this frontier; consumers encounter these influences and process them unknowingly. Firms that most effectively leverage their explorations of this frontier will gain crucial competitive advantages.” The sophistication that major corporations are bringing to these “explorations” is impressive. “Some companies, such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Hallmark, Syngenta, Bank of America, Glaxo, American Century and General Motors are beginning to conduct ‘deep dives’ on specific emotions in order to understand their subtle nuances and operation,” writes Zaltman. “For example, a study of the meaning of ‘joy’ conducted for one of the world’s leading brands identified more than 15 elements of this basic emotion. These insights are leading the firm to a major overhaul of the brand story.”
Even neuroscience is being brought to bear in the pursuit of sales, giving rise to “neuromarketing.” Instead of quizzing people in traditional focus groups—a flawed process because it’s never clear if answers are anything more than conscious rationalizations of unconscious judgments— marketers attach them to MRIs. When subjects are exposed to products or ads, their brains light up. Electrodes are also used to monitor heart rates, skin temperatures, and the near-invisible twinges of facial muscles that betray surges of emotion. Analysis of the results can reveal a great deal about emotional engagement and how feelings influence thoughts. This means, in effect, that marketers can access both Head and Gut. Done well, neuromarketing can give marketers an understanding of what happens inside a brain that not even the owner of that brain can match.
Here, then, is another answer to the question posed at the beginning of this book. We are safer and healthier than ever and yet we are more worried about injury, disease, and death than ever. Why? In part, it’s because there are few opportunities to make money from convincing people they are, in fact, safer and healthier than ever—but there are huge profits to be made by promoting fear. “Unreasoning fear,” as Roosevelt called it, may be bad for those who experience it and society at large, but it’s wonderful for share-holders. The opportunities for growth are limitless. All that’s required is that fears keep rising, and those who reap the profits know which buttons to push in our Stone Age minds to ensure that happens.
H. L. Mencken once wrote that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Mencken penned this line in 1920, at the height of the first Red Scare. At the time, American anarchists were blowing up buildings and people at an alarming rate. The attorney general, Alexander Mitchell Palmer, twice escaped assassination attempts. In the crackdown that followed—the infamous “Palmer Raids”—gross abuses of civil liberties were committed but no Bolshevik conspiracy was uncovered. It was clear that, terrible as the violence was, it was the work of a tiny number of radicals. On balance, Mencken was right to think politicians were hyping the threat out of all proportion because it suited their interests to do so—but he was quite wrong to deny the bona fides of politicians who saw a Red under every bed. The beliefs were sincere, if misguided. The fact that the Red Scare was also wonderfully convenient for many politicians and officials—especially a young J. Edgar Hoover— didn’t change that.
Like Mencken, we often make the mistake of thinking that politicians rattle the rubes with scary stories then laugh about it over drinks. In reality, the fact that a politician may have something to gain by promoting a threat does not mean he or she does not believe the threat is real. This goes for the pharmaceutical industry, security companies, and all the others who promote and profit from fear. In fact, I’m quite sure that in most cases those promoting fear are sincere, for the simple reason that humans are compulsive rationalizers. People like to see themselves as being basically good, and so admitting that they are promoting fear in others in order to advance their interests sets up a nasty form of cognitive dissonance: I know I’m basically a nice person; what I’m doing is awful and wrong. Those are two thoughts that do not sit comfortably in the same head and the solution is rationalization: Suburban housewives really are at risk if they don’t buy my home alarm, and I’m doing them a service by telling them so. Self-interest and sincere belief seldom part company.