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Guilt is a hormonal change induced at childbirth. I concluded that about 17 years ago when my first child was born. If you go back to work, you feel guilty about not staying home. If you stay home, you feel guilty about depriving your children and family of funds for all those essential lessons and electronic stuff. You can even feel guilty for bringing kids into this evil world or adding to overpopulation. Actually, you don't even have to have childbirth to have guilt (although it really helps). You can feel guilty about choosing not to have kids, you can feel guilty about not being able to have kids, you can feel guilty about not providing the requisite grandchildren. As your kids age, you can feel guilty about making them clean out the kitchen sink (mean mother) or guilty about not making them clean out the kitchen sink (lack of discipline). I am apparently not the only one who has noticed the great value of guilt in the modern world. Market researchers are busy carrying out extensive studies to determine how best to use guilt to make you buy their products. No, I'm not kidding. An article in the latest issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology reveals an intensive assessment of how best to use the concept of guilt to induce people to buy specific products. As is always the case, this is more complicated than meets the eye. First, you have to decide who you are going to use as guinea pigs in your study. Here, they automatically used working mothers. They note that "considerable research suggests that working mothers experience a variety of guilt-induced forms of stress." No kidding. Next, you have to carefully decide exactly what it is that you want working mothers to feel guilty about. Naturally, anything to do with kids works the best. In this study, they decided to make people feel guilty about bread and dental floss. Personally, I think these were excellent choices. I could write a book on ways to lie to your dentist about how often you floss. As far as bread is concerned, I have always thought it would be a marketing stroke of genius if they could come up with a way to make it look like you are buying a loaf of all- natural 17-grain stone ground hand-kneaded preservative-free bread when you are actually getting the foam-rubber white stuff because that's the only thing your kids will eat. If you could develop such a marketing trick, it would go a long way toward reducing supermarket guilt. Anyhow, back to the study. The authors made up a bunch of different ads which were supposed to make you feel either just a little guilty ("It's a good idea to teach your kids to floss") or really guilty ("If you don't teach your kids to floss right this very minute they will grow up to be serial murderers and it will all be your fault.") The question they asked was essentially: If you make people feel guilty, are they more likely to buy your product--and is it more effective to make them feel a little guilty or really guilty? The study goes on to report some interesting results. First, they have a bunch of tables and numbers and asterisks and Greek letters. After you skip over that stuff, you find out that most of the people in the study got mad. It turns out that people don't much like it when you make them feel guilty. The guiltier you make them feel, the madder they got. As you might guess, people do not want to buy your product if you make them mad. It seems that the secret is to make them feel guilty without making them mad. Frankly, I think there are some problems with this research. To begin with, I really don't want to have to feel guilty about things like bread and dental floss. I'd rather save my guilt for more important things like not returning the permission slips to school on time or forgetting to play tooth fairy and damaging my child for life. Besides, (and the authors of the study point this out), it may be very difficult to make people feel guilty, without making them mad. It would be Ok with me if we didn't bother trying. 729 words |
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