Adding Regret to Fear Appeals: When the Going Gets Difficult, Regret Gets Action

• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Author: Kirsten Passyn
• Date: 01 December 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joca.12254

WINTER 2019 VOLUME 53, NUMBER 4 1507

KIRSTEN PASSYN

Adding Regret to Fear Appeals: When the Going Gets

Difcult, Regret Gets Action

In accord with Protection Motivation Theory, this article nds fear

appeals ineffective at motivating health protection behaviors perceived

to be difcult; when task difculty is high, there is a decrease in per-

ceptions of self-efcacy and a reduction in health protection behaviors.

This research examines a novel way to motivatehealth protection when

task difculty is salient by adding regretto fear appeals. The inclusion of

regret, an emotionthat motivates corrective behavioral change, bolsters

self-efcacy and enhances health protection intentions. In fact, even

when task difculty is made salient, self-efcacy and behavioral inten-

tions remain strong in the fear plus regret condition. Thus, in contrast

to straight fear appeals, adding regret to fear appeals results in a rever-

sal effect enhancing self-efcacy and behavioral intentions when task

difculty is made salient. This research highlights the independence of

task difculty, self-efcacy,and the role of regret in motivating difcult

health protection behaviors.

Motivating health protection behaviors, especially difcult behaviors, is

challenging (Cismaru and Lavack 2007). For example, while it is common

knowledge among sexually active young adults that using a condom is

an excellent preventative measure against sexually transmitted diseases

(STDs), over half of sexually active college students report not regularly

using condoms (Rossi 2013). Why not use a condom? Similarly, why do

not we switch off our cell phones when we drive, make appointments to

get our annual physicals, or eat healthier? While these actions seem easy

in the moment, they are difcult for us to enact. Focus groups suggest

that condom usage is not easy (Morton, Kim, and Treise 2011) because

adults nd it excruciatingly difcult and lack the condence to interrupt

the mood and to say, “We need a condom.” The purpose of this research

is to determine how consumers can be motivated to act when taking action

proves difcult.

Kirsten Passyn (kpassyn@citadel.edu) is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Baker School

of Business. The author would like to thank Mita Sujan, James R. Bettman, Patrick Fennell, and David

Shepherd for guidance on this paper. In addition, the author would like to thank the review team for

their helpful insight in crafting this article.

The Journal of Consumer Affairs, Winter 2019: 1507–1534

DOI: 10.1111/joca.12254

Copyright 2019 by The American Council on Consumer Interests

1508 THE JOURNAL OF CONSUMER AFFAIRS

Health protection campaigns have traditionally relied on fear appeals to

promote protective behaviors. Fear is a natural consequence of perceiving

personal threat based on health messaging (Arthur and Quester 2004). Fear

motivates either adaptiveor maladaptive self-protection. Research on these

campaigns has demonstrated the necessity of self-efcacy or condence

in one’s ability to perform the advocated adaptive behavior (Sturges and

Rogers 1996). A meta-analysis on Protection Motivation Theory (PMT)

research identied self-efcacy as the factor with the strongest positive

impact on protection motivation (Floyd, Prentice-Dunn, and Rogers 2000).

In other words, if people feel they cannot perform the behavior, they do

not even try. Therefore, encouraging protection motivation for difcult

tasks, which are typically associated with low self-efcacy, has proven

challenging.

Recent research has looked at the motivating inuence of a mixed emo-

tional response nding that mixed emotions signal goal conict (Berrios,

Totterdell, and Kellett 2015) and this mixed affective response may effec-

tively facilitate self-control efforts (Berrios, Totterdell, and Kellett 2018).

In the health domain, research has demonstrated both the likelihood of

mixed emotions in response to health messaging and a positive motiva-

tional impact of the mixed emotional experience on behavioral change

(Myrick and Oliver 2015). Regret, in particular, is likely to be evoked

in response to health messaging as people are likely to perceive a per-

sonal threat (fear) and also feel responsible for making the bad deci-

sions that increased their susceptibility to the threat (regret) (Dijkstra and

Buunk 2008). Accordingly, Passyn and Sujan (2006) found that in com-

parison to appeals that only evoked fear, appeals that evoked fear plus

regret were more effective at motivating the simple behavior of using

sunscreen.

The purpose here is to understand if adding regret to fear appeals can

promote not only simple health behaviors, as previously demonstrated, but

also health behaviors that prove overwhelming. PMT has conrmed the

necessity of self-efcacy for action, so what happens when the difculty

of a task is made salient? Previous research has attempted to motivate

difcult action by bolstering self-efcacy. In practice, however,this proves

challenging to do, and the question of how to motivate difcult behaviors

remains unanswered (Smith and Pope 1992). Uniquely, this research

investigates whether adding regret to fear appeals can erase self-efcacy

doubts and motivate difcult tasks. If an ad evokes not only fear but also

regret, will a person interrupt an intimate moment and say what is actually

difcult: “Stop, we need a condom.”