Some diseases strike at random, but others are directly
related to some core aspect of a person’s identity. Smoking is a dangerous activity that can lead
to lung cancer and heart disease. But,
smoking becomes a part of a person’s identity, which can make it hard for a
person to stop smoking. Diseases like
breast and ovarian cancer strike women.
They have a deep connection to women’s self-identity, both because of
the role of breasts in appearance and sexual attractiveness, and because of the
role of both the breasts and ovaries in reproduction.
This connection between disease and identity is important,
because it can influence the effectiveness of methods of disease
prevention. In the case of breast
cancer, for example, many organizations have developed huge public-relations
campaigns to promote breast self-examinations and mammograms for women over
40. These campaigns have met with mixed
success.
A new study in the June, 2011 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research by Stefano
Puntoni, Steven Sweldens, and Nader Tavassoli suggests that this relationship
between identity and disease may limit the effectiveness of these campaigns.
In one set of studies, they had women read an ad about
breast cancer. One version of the ad
highlighted women’s self-identity. The
ad started by saying, “Hey, Woman! Yes, you!”
It also had images of women and pictures of pink ribbons. The other version of the ad did not highlight
women’s self-identity. It just started
by saying “Hey You!” and it did not have any pictures of women in the ad. After reading these ads, people rated their
risk of a variety of diseases including breast cancer. Specifically for breast cancer, the women who
read the ad targeted at women rated their risk as lower than the women who read the ad that was not targeted
specifically at women. In another study
using an ad for ovarian cancer, women donated less money to fight ovarian cancer after reading an ad that was
targeted at women than at an ad that was not specifically targeted.
The idea here is that when a person’s identity is
threatened, she wants to remove the threat by not paying attention to the
information that makes her uncomfortable.
Consistent with this idea, in another study, women showed better memory
for a breast cancer ad when it was not targeted specifically at women than when
it was.
So, what can be done?
The authors suggest that threats to identity are most effective when the
person does not connect the feeling of threat to their identity specifically. That is, when reading an ad like a breast
cancer ad, a woman might find that the ad makes her uncomfortable, and might
just choose to skip it to avoid feeling bad.
The authors suggest that acknowledging that a subject is
fearful up front can make messages relating to that fear effective. To demonstrate this point, they did one
additional study in which women saw either an ad that highlighted gender or one
that did not. In this case, though,
before rating their risk of diseases, they stated their fear of a variety of
diseases. Women who saw an ad that
highlighted gender, but first rated their degree of fear of breast cancer
showed about the same level of belief about the risk of breast cancer as women
who saw the ads that did not highlight gender.
That is, expressing that breast cancer is threatening helped
women to acknowledge that it also poses a risk.
These studies demonstrate why it is so difficult to help
people engage in behaviors that would help to prevent diseases. Many diseases are threatening to a person’s
identity. We do not like to pay
attention to information that threatens our sense of self. So, we ignore that information.
There are two lessons here.
If you are trying to convince others about the importance of
preventative behaviors, try to do it in a way that minimizes the relationship
between disease and identity. On the
other side of the coin, if you see information about prevention behaviors that
feels threatening, start by acknowledging that disease is scary. That will help you to recognize that the fear
need not be the guiding force in your beliefs and behavior.
