The role of emotionally persuasive messages in the skin cancer prevention campaign

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite a multitude of social campaigns and widely publicized scientific evidence of how excessive, unprotected sun exposure damages the skin and is a key cause of the skin cancer, people continue to crowd the beaches, oftentimes without any sunscreen protection. Also numbers of those who use sunscreen on a daily basis remain low. In this study, we analyze how the attitudes toward tanning and behavior of sunscreen use change under the influence of persuasive messages. We compare the effectiveness of an emotionally neutral persuasive message to an emotionally negative persuasive message. We show that persuasive messages combining fear with other negative emotions are successful, however, those generating negative emotions are not significantly more effective than emotionally neutral messages. Furthermore, our results show that while persuasive messages can change the attitudes toward tanning, they do not directly lead to a behavioral change in terms of sunscreen use intentions. However, as we show, the tanning attitude mediates the relationship between persuasive message and the attitude toward sunscreen use and intentions to use it. The resulting change in the tanning attitude contributes to a change in the attitude toward use of sunscreen.