In our previous piece, ("America's Perfect Storm of Fear"), we diagnosed that the root cause of the rampant anger sweeping the country is fear. Fear of losing our jobs, homes, mortgages, health services, retirement plans, etc. Even fear that the American dream is dead.
We examined how our political parties, governments (local, state and federal) and the media use fear to gain support for policy initiatives and drive ratings and profitability. Fear is effective. Fear trumps facts.
Fear has another consequence: fear kills trust. In extensive research, we see that fear-based messages reduce the favorables of the communicator as much, if not more, than the target of the communications.
Take negative advertising in politics. There is no question that it works to increase the unfavorables of the candidate being attacked. Increasingly, however, it also increases the unfavorables of the attacker. This is what we saw in 2008 when Hillary Clinton tried to attack Barack Obama for his "guns and religion" comment. And it is what we saw when McCain hurt himself through a series of ineffective negative attacks on Obama in the general election.
The same thing is happening today on a range of political issues. Republicans may have slowed the process of health care reform and even increased opposition to reform by framing it as a "government takeover" of health care. But they also inflicted further damage to their own poor reputations by continuing to be the "party of no." On financial regulatory reform, President Obama has successfully criticized Wall Street's "battalions of lobbyists" but doing so has done little to help his approval ratings. And arguably it is his shift in tone from aspirational candidate to hard-nosed president that is responsible for a good portion of his drop in approval over the past 17 months.
In his new book The Language of Trust: Selling Ideas in a World of Skeptics, Michael Maslansky, coauthor of this piece, explores the impact of fear-based communication. In the corporate world, fear-based communication often leads to action paralysis. This is especially true in financial matters where a growing body of work shows that fear and uncertainty cause inaction rather than action. In other areas, especially politics, continued use of fear-based communication creates an equivalent of learned helplessness - where increasing segments of the population not only don't trust the political establishment, they also become disenfranchised out of a sense of helplessness to affect the situation (this is one reason why highly negative campaigns tend to have lower voter turnout). And finally, continued use of fear-based communication creates a tolerance for it, requiring an ever-increasing amplification of fear in order to achieve the desired reaction. (So it is no surprise that the evening news shows consistently try to turn the local "cat in the tree" story into a story about "an evil landowner determined to let his tree grow to dangerous heights despite the unavoidable tragedy that awaited an innocent feline who happened to find herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.")
The impact of this pervasive use of fear-based communication is not in doubt. The overwhelming majority of Americans, as we reported, do not trust the government, the media, corporations, even our neighbors.
This loss of trust is not some esoteric concept. It is not about people holding hands and working together. It has real implications for our future - both as a society and as an economy.
We have become a society where we increasingly assume the worst in people. We have created a culture of blame in which people choose to point fingers and demand punishment even before we find solutions to ensure that the same problems do not happen again. Our legal structure reflects this by incentivizing people to sue rather than negotiate. Our regulatory structure reflects this by creating a system that is constantly looking backwards to address what has already happened rather than directing its energies forward to better but less politically engaging solutions. And our economy reflects this because lack of trust is highly correlated with a focus on short-term gains over long-term strategies.
Sadly, for governments and the media, re-establishing trust is a catch-22. Fear works -- or at least it helps. Fear rallies the fearful. It drives the base. It pushes people at the extremes of any debate to act. And fear drives ratings and profits.
Ironically, many corporations (suffering from a real deficit of trust themselves) have learned that fear-based selling techniques no longer work the way they used to. Companies have shifted from risks of non-use (e.g. "what will happen to your family when you die") to the rewards of use (e.g. "you and your family will have security and peace of mind when you purchase life insurance"). They have also learned (or in some cases re-learned) that building trust is an effective long-term business strategy. Web companies like Zappos and Netflix and traditional companies like PepsiCo and Starbucks are incorporating trust-building into their business models. Though there are plenty of examples of companies that operate for the short-term - and many more who still are slaves to quarterly earnings calls - there are an increasing number who recognize the need to balance their short-term profits in the interests of trusted long-term relationships with their customers.
The question is: do the media and politicians want to break the cycle and trade fear for trust? Can they? Or is the cycle simply unbreakable?
It is interesting to see the difference between news organizations and their corporate brethren in other industries. In most industries, the emerging and insurgent businesses tend to prioritize trust and responsibility. They are the leaders in environmental production and sustainability. They build their businesses around new models of governance, ethics and transparency. This does not appear to be the case in the media. The so-called mainstream media is now forced to compete with an endless stream of sites that have created a race to the bottom for news quality. CNN now stands as the last of the moderate cable news sources. Perhaps not surprisingly, it also stands in last place in the ratings behind left-leaning MSNBC and much more successful right-leaning Fox News.
In this environment there seems to be little incentive to engender trust.
For the government, the story is much the same. We are certain that government would like to be "trusted" by more than just 22% of Americans. We are equally certain that politicians do not take into account that lack of trust when developing their political strategies. For politicians, the "electoral bottom line" (winning elections) and the "institutional bottom line" (earning or maintaining trust for the institution of Congress) are often in fundamental conflict. Politicians are able to pander, horse-trade and attack their way to electoral victory even as they drive down participation in, and drive up distrust of, the system. And that is exactly what they have done.
Unfortunately, there are few good modern examples to point to in the media or politics that can show us a way forward. Like him or not, candidate Obama is one. Though not without its negative elements, Obama's candidacy was defined by positive communication rather than fear. And he was elected in the highest voter turnout election in 40 years.
When and if government and the media want to get serious about rebuilding trust with the American people, a few corporations are there to help guide the way, as surprising and ironic as it may seem to many.
Michael Maslansky is author of the new book, The Language of Trust: Selling Ideas in a World of Skeptics and CEO of maslansky luntz + partners, a language strategy and research consultancy. Peter V. Emerson is the founding partner of Emerson Associates International, a company providing political and communications strategies to political parties, governments, corporations and NGOs and a Scholar in Residence, Kirkland House, Harvard College and a Visiting Research Fellow, King's College London.