Nathan Walter

So what tends to work very well are messages that are not overtly persuasive.

Again, so if this threat is associated with

They are trying to force me to do something.

We can be less obvious about our intent.

That's why often testimonials do such a great job.

I'm not telling you that you have to vaccinate your kid.

I'm telling you what happened to a friend who decided not to vaccinate their kid.

That's also why often messages in TV shows

like Grey's Anatomy or now The Pit are so effective.

Again, this is not an overtly persuasive message.

It's almost like a Trojan horse where you embed a message, but people don't feel like you're preaching to them, like you're forcing them to do something.

There's a variety of ways to do this.

So one thing that we never want to do is we don't want to scare people too much.

One of the most frustrating findings we have, especially with smokers, when you scare them, and a lot of the public service announcements, they will tell you, you smoke, you die.

Actually, the first thing that people who smoke want to do when they get very anxious is smoke even more.

So in a way, you want to reverse that script.

You want to actually make them feel better about themselves because then they're not as defensive.

So you can tell people, I understand why it's difficult.

I understand how you feel.

Or if you want to tailor the message to a particular group in the population, for instance, think about there's