Reflection for 10/24

While I was not in class this week, I was at home deeply in thought about fear messages. Looking over the slides and the readings for this week, I was reminded about some discussions I have had with brother about quitting smoking. I often invoke the fact and fear arguments with him in trying to get him to quit smoking, and have failed pretty regularly. Now my brother would be considered low motivation to quit smoking and so I would normally think that a fear message would be on target for getting him motivated. However, as it turns out, money was the only thing that got him to quit. He figured out that if he stopped buying cigarettes, he would save so much more money each month that he could actually afford the things he likes on the weekends like golfing. I bring up this story because it reminds me that fear messages while affective with some groups, are equally as ineffective with other groups. Liz brought up an important point about how fear messages have often been good at stopping negative behaviors, but this experience with my brother, and the lecture slides mentioning that “too much fear = not effective” makes me think about our current project.

If our goal is to increase a positive behavior (selecting healthier options), we will simultaneously have to encourage decreasing a negative behavior (eating fat, crappy food). Therefore, I think I have just long-windedly expressed that fear messages will not be the way to go for our target audience, I think. I feel like if we move from the weight gain approach as Stephanie mentioned (ie you don’t want to gain the freshman 15), we are going to have a difficult time; Weight is something that can happen over such a period of time that people don’t notice it’s happening until those jeans they brought to college no longer fit. I think that this weight gain will not only be something that is “too much fear” for some but just plain out of sight for others. I think if we use the freshman 15 approach we are going to have to use that with the group that already has some involvement/ motivation as it is likely they are already thinking about this when they make their healthier food substitutions.

I like the idea of a humor or even slice-of-life approach, especially with our target audience. However we are going to have to be very thoughtful as to how we frame this message to our audience in order to be most effective.