How can using psychological theories of persuasion make safety campaigns more effective? 

Efforts to improve safety through communicating the risks publicly have been made for well over a century, with organisations such as RoSPA being established in 1916 and the UK government running road safety campaigns for more than 75 years.

Over time, posters and leaflets moved to initiatives like The Tufty Club for children and well-known TV campaigns in the 1960s and 70s, onto more sophisticated campaigns in today’s multimedia world.

All safety campaigns seek to persuade people to adopt different behaviours to keep them and others from harm. Over recent years many communications practitioners have turned to psychological theories of persuasion to achieve this aim. So, what can these theories teach us about making safety messages more effective?

Methods of processing

The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion (ELM), developed by Richard E. Petty and John Cacioppo in the 1980s, outlines two main ‘routes’ by which communications affect thought processes: central and peripheral. The employment of either the central or peripheral route depends on individual and situational factors, with the central route favoured when there's a high probability of 'elaboration' (deep thinking about a message), and the peripheral route favoured when the likelihood is low (Cacioppo and Petty, 1986).
 
As American academic Richard M. Perloff explains, central processing happens when there is a high level of motivation and ability to comprehend the message, involving thorough evaluation of rational arguments and ideas. The likelihood of occurrence increases when the communicated issue holds personal relevance for the recipient and carries significant consequences for them, or when they possess prior knowledge, involvement, or interest in the subject matter. This route is associated with a deeper, long-lasting change in attitudes.
 
By contrast, peripheral processing uses simple, superficial decision-making based on cues such as physical appeal or the perceived credibility of the source and it happens when the person receiving the message has less motivation or ability to process it. They use quick ‘shortcuts’ that reduce the need to think more deeply.
 
The ELM suggests that while certain people may adopt safer behaviour through listening to rational argument, a large proportion may find such information irrelevant to them and are more likely to be persuaded by mental cues to make decisions, especially in our age of information overload.
 
It also emphases the need to look at what truly motivates the audience that the campaign is trying to target. For instance, one of the Health and Safety Executive’s most well-known campaigns of recent years was the Make the promise, Come home safe initiative, which aimed to reduce the number of deaths and injuries in agriculture. The award-winning campaign encouraged farmers to pledge to return home safely for their families and was lauded for turning “a hard-to-articulate issue into something human”. It did this by focusing on something personal that would motivate many in an industry often built on family businesses.

The fear factor

Many safety campaigns attempt to use shock and fear to prompt people to change their behaviour. Yet research on road safety education by Dr Elizabeth Box of the RAC Foundation found that this approach can actually be counter-productive, especially among young males, prompting defensive or even hostile reactions.

How fear affects behaviour has long been a contentious issue. The Extended Parallel Process Model, developed by Kim Witte in the 1990s, aimed to consolidate the theories previously developed. As with the ELM, Witte argues that there are two ways a fear-arousing message can be interpreted by the brain: Danger control and fear control.  Danger control occurs when people perceive that they are under threat but able to act to tackle the danger, while fear control happens when people are rendered helpless and overwhelmed by the threat, so focus on controlling the fear rather than avoiding the danger. Therefore, for fear to be an effective campaign strategy and persuade people to change their behaviour, it “must harness fear and channel it into a constructive (danger control) direction” (Perloff, The Dynamics of Persuasion: Communication and Attitudes in the Twenty-First Century, 2017: 397).

Taking shortcuts

 American psychologist Dr Robert B. Cialdini’s 1984 book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion builds on the idea of peripheral processing where people use mental shortcuts and argues that “the ever-accelerating pace and information crush of modern life will make this particular form of unthinking compliance more and more prevalent in the future” (Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice, 2001: ix).
 
Cialdini says that influence is based on six key principles – he later added a seventh:

• Reciprocity: When someone is given something, they feel obliged to give something back.

• Scarcity: Individuals desire greater quantities of items that are scarce.

• Authority: Individuals tend to follow the guidance of reputable and knowledgeable authorities.

• Consistency: Individuals tend to prefer maintaining consistency with their prior statements or actions.

• Liking: A person is more likely to agree with someone they like – and tend to like those who are similar to themselves, pay them compliments and/or cooperate with them.

• Social proof: People look to behaviours of others to determine their own, especially when they are uncertain.

• Unity: People tend to agree with those who share a membership in a category that is related to our personal or social identity.

 Further developing Cialdini’s work, Nudge Theory was introduced by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their 2008 bestselling book, and it argues that small changes in context can have a big influence on behaviour by focusing attention in a particular direction or ‘nudging’ people. An example used by the authors to illustrate this is an image of a black housefly being put into each urinal at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, which reduced spillage by 80 per cent by subtly giving men a target to aim at. Central to the approach is the idea that these nudges will influence individuals to make free choices that they themselves feel make their lives better. (Sunstein and Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, 2008).

The rise of nudge

Nudge theory has become widely used by organisations such as the World Health Organisation and national governments, including the UK’s. In 2010, the Coalition Government set up the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), often also known as the Nudge Unit, with the aim of “finding intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves”.
 
The BIT now operates as an independent company. In 2021 it worked with the Centre for Work Health and Safety in New South Wales, Australia, and a major food delivery platform to develop and test behaviourally-informed approaches to tackle health and safety issues faced by food delivery workers in the gig economy – undoubtedly a key emerging challenge for health and safety practitioners.
 
The project found that workers felt constant pressure with their delivery timeframes, resulting in unsafe behaviour such as speeding or riding through red lights. This was often due to a belief that the delivery times displayed on the delivery app were deadlines rather than estimates, and that they would be penalised if they were not met. 
 
The BIT designed a series of messages to reframe workers’ perceptions of delivery times and although it had limited success due to low engagement, showed “that behaviourally-informed safety messaging has potential to mitigate” health and safety risks to workers if the timing and medium used were effective.
 
The EAST framework was developed by the Behavioural Insights Team, and it says that to encourage a behaviour, it should be made Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely. The framework offers advice on using behavioural approaches in communications and its imprint can clearly be seen on recent policy campaigns:

Easy: The BIT recommends that communicators should present their key message early, keep language simple, be specific about recommended actions and break down a complex goal into simpler, easier steps to make it seem more achievable.

An example of this can be seen in National Highways’ recent campaign, which is entitled Little changes, change everything and sets out a list of small changes that drivers can make that will help towards avoiding collisions and making journeys safer.
 
Attractive: This draws strongly on the ELM, advising that campaign developers should attract attention, either through a cognitive approach that finds new ways of highlighting the consequences of the behaviour, or through less direct feelings and associations. These should be personalised and draw on the need to have a positive self-image. Messages can also be made more attractive by ‘gamifying’ them.

Social: This draws on the assumption that the majority of people want to conform to the ‘social norm’ by behaving as others do but warns against inadvertently reinforcing a negative social norm by making it seem as if a ‘problem behaviour’ is actually widespread.
 
The latest THINK! initiative to encourage young men to wear seatbelts uses simple language and both audible and visual cues relating to the ‘clicking’ of putting a seatbelt on. According to the Department for Transport, the campaign is targeted at male drivers aged 17-24 and is “backed by extensive research into the motivational levers that apply to young men”, focusing on “the power of social consequences and relatable scenarios to show what young friends risk missing out on if they don’t belt up”.
 
Timely: The Behavioural Insights Team argues that timing is an often overlooked but crucial aspect of planning messages and advises planners to prompt people when they are likely to be most receptive and emphasise immediate costs and benefits, which are much more influential on people than longer-term results that can seem vague and hypothetical. It also espouses helping people plan their response to events in advance.
 
The National Water Safety Forum’s Respect the Water campaign did this by increasing activity during spring and summer when more people would be tempted to get into coastal and inland water. It also provides very specific step-by-step advice on what to do if an emergency happens.

 
However, while encouraging the use of the EAST framework, the Behavioural Insights Team strongly advocates rigorous testing and trialling of new interventions, ideally through randomised controlled trials based on a thorough understanding of the context, warning that “changing people’s intentions, beliefs, or attitudes… will often shape our behaviours, but not necessarily directly and in ways that we might expect”.