Tob Control 1998;7:5-8 ( Spring )

Cover essay

The return of scare tactics

David Hill^a, Simon Chapman^b, Robert Donovan^c

^a Centre for Behavioural Research in Cancer, Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria, Carlton South, Victoria, Australia, ^b Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, ^c Graduate School of Management, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia

Correspondence to: Dr D Hill, Centre for Behavioural Research in Cancer, Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria, 1 Rathdowne Street, Carlton South, Victoria 3053, Australia. davidh@accv.org.au

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

	Article

Can you scare people out of smoking? Since Janis and Feshbach's influential research on the use of fear in dental hygiene education in the early 1950s,¹ several generations of health educators have often uncritically accepted as near holy writ that you should not try to scare people into healthy practices, including smoking prevention and cessation.^2 3 Given that survey evidence from ex-smokers has repeatedly affirmed that personalised concern about "scary" health consequences is the primary motivation ascribed to smoking cessation^4-6 and is associated with predictors of cessation,⁷ interesting questions arise about whether this dogma is empirically grounded or whether it rather reflects a profession-wide neurosis intent on avoiding opprobrium from those who believe it is somehow not "nice" to deal in gory imagery in the name of persuasion.⁸

A mass media-led campaign launched in Australia in June 1997 has been seen by many as "the mother of all scare campaigns" (see the . . . [Full text of this article]

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