“Top 10” Lists: Public Ads that Hurt the Cause

Whether trying to get people to quit smoking, exercise more often, or simply get out to vote, public service announcements (PSAs) genuinely attempt to promote societal well-being. One pervasive strategy is the use of “Top 10” reasons to change a certain behavior. For instance, the National Institute of Health (NIH) website currently includes a “Top 10 Reasons to Quit Smoking” PSA that lists, among others, the following reasons: “(1) I will reduce my chances of a heart attack, (2) I will reduce my chances of getting lung cancer, emphysema, and other lung diseases, (3) I will have better smelling clothes, hair, breath, home, and car.” Because these “Top 10” lists are generally exhaustive, they inevitably include both strong and mildly-strong reasons to change behavior. In this report, we question whether such PSAs actually help or hurt the cause. This question builds on past work on the Presenter’s Paradox (Weaver, Garcia, and Schwarz 2012), showing that when people present information, they tend to use a strategy that resembles “adding” (more is better) while people evaluating that same information tend to use a process that resembles averaging (less is more). For instance, while presenters thought that adding a $15 voucher for books to a $1,750 tuition credit would increase recipients’ perceptions of the generosity of a scholarship, recipients actually evaluated the $1,750 tuition credit + $15 books package as significantly less generous than the $1,750 tuition credit alone.