Dr David Yeager’s new book, “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People”, aims to help parents, educators, and policymakers understand how young people think and what kinds of messages they respond to. In this edited excerpt, Dr Yeager describes events around the ‘truth’ anti-smoking campaign in Florida in the late 1990s, where an advertising agency challenged the dominant approach of public health professionals.
One day in the spring of 1998, the public health establishment’s old guard faced off against the new guard in a meeting that would ultimately drastically improve one of the United States’ longest-standing public health crises.
The meeting was called by officials from the state of Florida, who were trying to select an advertising agency for a multimillion-dollar campaign to reduce teenage smoking. The money would come from a settlement to a class action lawsuit between Florida and the tobacco companies, as compensation for the cost to the state of treating smokers for cancer.
On one side of the conference room sat a platoon of conventionally trained government epidemiologists, the scientists who specialize in stopping the spread of diseases. The old guard had been invited to make sure that the winning ad agency upheld the CDC’s so-called approved strategy for stemming the tide of teenage smoking. Across the table sat Alex Bogusky, the creative director at then-upstart advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which was trying to win the business. The leader of the new guard, Bogusky was in his midthirties but looked ten years younger. He wore an impish grin, and the twinkle in his eye gave the impression that a wild idea lurked just around the corner. His frame was fit and lean from decades of mountain biking and other adventure sports. Next to Bogusky sat his artistic directors, all in their early twenties.
This approved strategy was the result of the epidemiologists’ hyperrational way of thinking about youth behavior, rooted in classical economic thinking.
What was the CDC’s approved strategy? It involved three messages for teenagers: (1) smoking causes cancer, (2) smoking makes your teeth yellow, and (3) smoking isn’t sexy. The CDC wanted Bogusky’s ads to drill this information into as many teenage heads as possible.
This approved strategy was the result of the epidemiologists’ hyperrational way of thinking about youth behavior, rooted in classical economic thinking. In this model, people decide something by weighing the relative costs and benefits, as well as an outcome’s likelihood and the time horizon. That is, if teenagers thought that smoking gave them a near-certain likelihood of a benefit in the immediate term (e.g. a nicotine buzz) but a very unlikely cost in the long term (e.g. cancer), then they would tend to choose to smoke. From this perspective, the appropriate public health response is to (1) make long-term costs seem far more certain (e.g. smokers would definitely get cancer) and (2) make near-term costs also seem more certain, such as changes to the teenager’s appearance (yellow teeth) or social life (unsexiness).
Bogusky thought this whole theory – and the CDC’s implementation of it – was doomed to fail. Weeks earlier, he had sent his young art directors undercover to skate parks and malls to test out the CDC’s approved strategy. Fully 100 percent of the teens they talked to could already eloquently describe, lit cigarette in hand, how smoking caused emphysema and cancer. They didn’t need someone to explain that. Were they worried about yellow teeth? Maybe when they were fifty! But not now. And by the way, smoking seemed to them to be a main reason why they were having lots and lots of sex. Smoking made their lives great! This research showed Bogusky that even if his ad campaign brought the CDC’s approved strategy to millions, it wouldn’t stop teens from smoking. It was conveying information that they either already knew to be true or already knew to be false. Not only was it redundant, it was also insulting. Telling a teenager something that they think they already know – especially when it’s an adult doing it ‘for their own good’ – comes across as an affront to their autonomy and competence. It’s disrespectful.
Anthropologists like to point out that our human ancestors often had ceremonies – rites of passage – in which youth declare, in front of their communities, that they were adults.
Bogusky suspected that the CDC experts had no idea what teenagers wanted out of smoking. Therefore they had no idea how to give them an alternative that could displace smoking. That’s why he prodded them, “Have any of you ever asked a teenager why they smoked – like, what they got out of it?” They were silent.
In Bogusky’s analysis, smoking served as a public, visible way for young people to declare their adultlike status. As young people moved from an age at which all their decisions were made for them into an age at which they took charge, teen smokers wanted to communicate to anyone around them that I make my own decisions about my own body. Anthropologists like to point out that our human ancestors often had ceremonies – rites of passage – in which youth declare, in front of their communities, that they were adults. Outside of a few religious and cultural traditions, modern society has lost the rite of passage ceremony. But that doesn’t mean that the underlying need that it served in our evolutionary past has been erased. Smoking filled that void. “Cigarettes were the best product ever to meet teens’ needs to demonstrate their status as adults,” Bogusky told me. “Once we understood that, we were like: Why wasn’t the teen smoking rate one hundred percent?”
by David Yeager
This extract was edited for the SSA website by Natalie Davies. The book, “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People”, is published by Simon & Schuster.
David Yeager PhD is Raymond Dickson Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his PhD and MA at Stanford University and his BA and MEd at the University of Notre Dame. David has consulted for Google, Microsoft, Disney, and the World Bank, as well as for the White House and the governments in California, Texas, and Norway. His research has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, and The Atlantic.
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