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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12801

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

O'Keefe DJ, Jensen JD.
The relative persuasiveness of gain-framed and loss-framed messages for encouraging disease prevention behaviors: a meta-analytic review.
J Health Commun 2007 Oct-Nov; 12:(7):623-44
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content?content=10.1080/10810730701615198


Abstract:

A meta-analytic review of 93 studies (N = 21,656) finds that in disease prevention messages, gain-framed appeals, which emphasize the advantages of compliance with the communicator’s recommendation, are statistically significantly more persuasive than loss-framed appeals, which emphasize the disadvantages of noncompliance. This difference is quite small (corresponding to r = .03), however, and appears attributable to a relatively large (and statistically significant) effect for messages advocating dental hygiene behaviors. Despite very good statistical power, the analysis finds no statistically significant differences in persuasiveness between gain- and loss-framed messages concerning other preventive actions such as safer-sex behaviors, skin cancer prevention behaviors, or diet and nutrition behaviors.

Keywords:
Databases, Bibliographic Epidemiologic Studies Health Behavior* Health Promotion/methods* Humans Patient Compliance/psychology* Persuasive Communication* Primary Prevention/methods* Social Marketing*

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909