Page 77 - The Power to Change Anything

66 INFLUENCER

house. As the title of the program suggests, the young people
were supposed to be completely horrified by the stories and
thus scared straight.
Only it didn’t work that way. When researchers took a closer
look at the program, they learned that teenagers who had been
given the scare tactics had no fewer encounters with the law
than their counterparts who stayed home. Why? Because the
Scared Straight program left out an important part of the story.
By the end of the inmate show-and-tell, it was clear that prison
was bad. The delinquents were convinced. They never wanted
to go to prison.
What the inmates didn’t make clear was that if the teen-
agers continued doing what they were doing, they would even-
tually be caught and sent to prison. And since most teenagers
harbor an illusion of personal invulnerability, they didn’t con-
nect the dots on their own. They didn’t create the full cogni-
tive map: “If I keep doing what I’m doing, I’ll get caught, and,
if I get caught, I’ll then go to prison. Therefore, I’ll straighten
out my life now.” Instead, they believed that they would con-
tinue committing crimes and never get caught, so the whole
prison ordeal was irrelevant.

Provide Hope
The takeaway here is that you don’t want to merely share
poignant and repulsive negative outcomes. Make sure that your
story also offers up an equally credible and vivid solution.
For instance, consider what happened to a team of Stanford
researchers who told only the negative part of a story to their
subjects. The researchers showed subjects disgusting pictures
of rotting gums as a means of compelling them to floss their
teeth. That should keep them brushing and flossing, right? It
turns out though that viewing the pictures had no long-term
effect on the subjects. The researchers didn’t offer any correc-
tive steps—subjects were not given the solution to the problem.