The more they warned, the more they smoked

Top line. Gruesome cigarette warnings backfired—driving smoking rates up instead of down. The reason? Hidden mental frictions like the reactance bias, which blocks persuasion when freedom feels threatened. This article unpacks five subconscious stumbling blocks, drawn from Jonah Berger’s The Catalyst, and offers tactics to help shift stubborn mindsets. Gruesome images and grim stats didn’t […]

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The subconscious brain is more influenced by questions

Why questions work better than answers

In 2017, an Australian ad campaign to persuade consumers to reduce plastic straw consumption crashed and burned. The campaign didn’t fail because Australians aren’t bothered about the 8 million tonnes of non-biodegradable plastic that gets dumped into the world’s oceans every year. It bombed because the human subconscious mind cares about its autonomy more. When

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