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Words by Darren Sutton

May 04, 2017

Fear - The Ultimate Motivator?

The Scared Straight Myth and what we can learn for safety

Back in the late seventies and early eighties teenage crime in the USA was starting to become a real concern. A famous (or now infamous) campaign was initiated to Scare Straight the teenagers who were considered the most likely to follow a life of crime. They were taken in small groups to the most notorious of prisons (Rahway) and penitentiaries throughout New York and New Jersey.

They were exposed to all the trauma and discomfort of life in jail and told powerful stories from hardened criminals telling them precisely how BAD things would be if they didn’t change their behaviour and find themselves behind bars!

The campaign was declared a great success and was celebrated widely without properly gathering rigorous empirical evidence to support such claims. The initiative attracted huge funding and was replicated throughout America and in Europe as it just felt like it was the obvious thing to do. There was a whole TV series based on the programme. Mathew Syed describes in much more graphic detail in his book “Black Box Thinking” (a cracking read for any safety professional) the many flaws of this research.

In fact, now, a much more rigorous longitudinal study conducted by a significantly more credible research Fellow of Criminal Justice (Prof James Finckenauer) suggests that the programme actually encouraged the teenagers to continue their criminal behaviour and many went on to serve lengthy custodial sentences for violent and sex related crimes.

There are several reasons suggested as to why this programme failed so badly and had the opposite effect on the behaviour of the people it targeted. Among the reasons are that the visit to the jails had a desensitising effect on the teenagers. There’s also a widely held belief that the shock tactics encouraged the teenagers to convince themselves (sub-consciously at least) and their peers that they were tough enough to tolerate such conditions. Some of them saw it as a challenge that they needed to prove that they weren’t really that scared of what they’d seen and could survive and possibly thrive in that environment! Chapter 8 of Black Box Thinking gives much more detail for those interested. There is a very tragic end to the story that is still deeply disturbing today!

So, what can we learn from this for safety performance? Many of us will have seen and heard of similar situations in safety. We scratch our heads at why people still take unnecessary risks despite seeing all the films of what can happen to them. The same people have attended lectures and seminars and even heard first hand evidence from survivors of tragic accidents.

Of course exactly the same principals apply here, the effect on behaviour following such experiences whether it be in the training room or conference hall is often short term at best and we run exactly the same risk of desensitising and encouraging the people that we are trying to influence most to continue to undertake unsafe behaviours.

As safety professionals, we need to understand the things that can really start to motivate people to shift from a HAVE TO mindset to a WANT TO mindset for safety. There are better ways of influencing behaviour these days which are much more reliable and sustainable.

Thank you for reading, if you’re curious about better ways of influencing behaviour and improving safety performance take a look at our FREE sample ELearning Module at the link here below…

ABC Analysis - FREE Access Module