Designing Soap Operas to Change Behavior Could be Powerful Medicine
Designing to change behavior is the toughest challenge in cognitive design. This is especially true when it comes to designing products, services and communications to change health-related behavior including following the doctor’s advice to manage diabetes and other chronic conditions.
A new article in the LA Times, A Health Message Listeners can Relate To, describes the effectiveness of using soap-opera themed stories to achieve changes in health-related behaviors.
Stories convey important learning without having to work at it (low cognitive load). They are fun to repeat. Soap operas are the best structure to use for many health applications because they engage us in social learning or learning by observing (or hearing about) other people’s behavior. We are automatically programmed (or hardwired) to do this. This is why we ask leaders to be an example (model behaviors for employees) and your mom worries about who you hang out with (vicarious learning from your peer group). Further, soap operas by design “super size” (without lapsing into a parody) human drama giving them hard, deep and potential lasting emotion impact.
Because they have low cognitive load, invoke the powerful force of social learning and have over-sized emotional and psychological content they can be powerful devices for changing behavior.
April 13th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
One other aspect of soap operas to consider (re: cognition)—many viewers feel that they are part of a community of soap watchers, and actively participate in conversations with other fans about the characters, storylines, plots, etc. You’ll see this a lot on a college campus (in a dormitory, for example, people sharing a television form communities around different soaps), or in a retirement community (“Days or Our Lives” became a focal point of my grandmother’s community, and a source of constant examination). One might argue that these are excellent populations in which to encourage new, healthy habits, and the soaps might be particularly effective.
To my mind, the community intereraction increases the power of the stories, and may also provide the benefits of group cognition to individuals who find themselves at a roadblock in a behavior change process.
I’m not surprised to see this coming out of UAB—they had an extraordinary interest and commitment to preventive cardiology back when I was doing that sort of work, in large part driven by the population that they serve.
Given my Capstone topic, this post was particularly interesting. Prior to wanting to focus in on preventive health, I was doing literature searches on another big interest of mine, storytelling. This line of thinking opens up a new way to integrate those two topics. Thanks!