Use of story/narrative-based safety messages found to be more effective in influencing safety behaviour compared to technical warnings in a 2010 experimental study.
Summary to be posted in the coming weeks. Three variations of a safety message (image 2) were used. Participants then assembled a playset, and researchers observed the activity.
Overall, they found:
· A 19% improvement in safety behaviour in the story warning versus the non-narrative warnings
· Moreover, “injury stories did not create undue fear of the message object, demonstrating that brief anecdotes about accident victims can convince people to take reasonable precautions without creating unwarranted alarm about risks”
· Safety messages were thus more effective “when they contained brief stories about people who were injured in the past. This effect occurred even when we controlled for message concreteness, informational content, reading difficulty, message length, use of personal pronouns, message channel, and level of participant activity and interaction”.
Authors: Ricketts, M., Shanteau, J., McSpadden, B., & Fernandez-Medina, K. M. (2010). Social science & medicine, 70(9), 1441-1449.
Study link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.12.036
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