During one of my recent sessions on culture change for sustainability, a very earnest young lady asked me about the use of shock tactics to make people take the environment more seriously. My short answer was “no, it doesn’t work” but with my usual esprit de l’escalier, I thought of a great analogy on the way home.
I was using the elephant model of culture change in the session. In this model the elephant’s rider is our conscious mind, the elephant itself is our subconscious and the path is the environment we operate in. So to change people’s behaviour we have to instruct the rider, inspire the elephant and shape the path in a way that the elephant & rider go the way we want them to.
If you try shock tactics, it is the the equivalent of throwing a firecracker under the elephant. A number of things can happen:

• The firecracker is too small, so the elephant ignores it and does what it was doing;

• The firecracker scares the elephant so it retreats back down the path and refuses to move;

• The firecracker panics the elephant and it charges off in a random direction.

None of these are desirable outcomes.
The most famous example of such tactics were the UK Government’s “nightmare fairytale” climate change adverts on TV back in early 2010 which were criticised by the Advertising Standards Agency, which had no discernible positive impact, but caused a backlash from many elements of the media and jubilation in the climate change denial movement. These adverts blundered on many levels: people don’t like being preached at by politicians, the scare tactics were aimed at making you fear for your children and there was no clear call to action. You’ll notice they haven’t been repeated – for good reason.