In the late 1980s, the partnership for a Drug Free America launched a pretty famous public

service announcement.

I was a kid at the time, but I still remember it.

Maybe you do too.

This is your brain.

This is drugs.

Any questions?

The message was, doing drugs will fry your brain, just like that sizzling egg in the pan.

The informational content was pretty crude, but the point wasn't to convey information.

The point was to inspire fear.

You are using emotion in a way that helps people understand in their gut, help some translate

facts and data into something that's personally meaningful.

That's Amy Fairchild, Dean of the College of Public Health at the Ohio State University.

She's a historian and an ethicist, and she's done a lot of work on using fear to get people

to make better decisions about their health.

Fear is tricky, it's powerful, but it's also subjective.

What scares me in terms of my health may not scare you.

We don't want to take advantage of people's fears or use fear to create stigma about a

group or disease.

And yet, sometimes fear is the only appropriate response.

Imagine a case in which you see somebody swimming in an ocean with a shark.

You wouldn't simply just say to them, there's a shark approaching.

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