Rebel With a Cause: With Guests Francis Kelly & Christopher Bryan
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You're probably familiar with garden gnomes, those whimsical little ceramic or plastic figures, often with red cone hats and long white beards. Well, they were banned at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show in London for at least a century.

By 2011, a gnome rebellion had been brewing for years, with protests and marches demanding equal rights for these cheerful characters. That year, the Royal Horticultural Society made the unanimous decision to let garden gnomes join the festivities.

The ban was originally put in place to prevent, quote, brightly colored mythical creatures from overshadowing the garden displays. But it came to be seen by some as a relic of garden snobbery. The removal of the ban split opinions among Britain's green-thumbed community. But for many gardeners, the prohibition of garden gnomes was an affront to their horticultural freedom and worthy of rebellion. No, no, no, no, no, no.

In this episode, a behavior common to teenagers and garden gnome protesters that can be leveraged to help us make better decisions for your family, Mom, stop telling me to clean my room. your home, Charlotte County man was fined $3,000 by his homeowners association because his trees were about three feet too short. and your health.

I'm Dr. Katie Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about high-stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes. ♪

As you smoke, carbon monoxide, the poisonous gas we have mentioned, is attracted to the red corpuscles just as the oxygen was. This is one of the reasons why the smoker cannot run as fast or as far as he could if he didn't smoke. Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you. But it turns out that many of the early public health campaigns to curb this unhealthy habit were not all that successful. Enter Francis Kelly and the Truth Campaign.

Hi, my name is Fran Kelly, and I am the president and CEO of a branding consulting firm called CEO View Branding. Fran is a legend in advertising. Before starting my consulting career, I was president and CEO of an advertising agency called Arnold Worldwide, which is headquartered in Boston, but we have offices around the United States. And we're one of the largest advertising agencies in the U.S. So I've been working on branding and marketing for more than 40 years.

One of the most memorable projects Fran worked on was an anti-smoking campaign. In the 80s and the 90s, there had been a growing awareness that

tobacco-related illnesses were one of the leading causes of death in the United States and one of the leading causes of health care costs soaring in the United States. And more than 80% of smokers start smoking when they're teenagers. So there was a growing awareness that we had to stop teenagers from adopting cigarettes if we were going to address the tobacco health care problems in general. The

The public's attitudes towards large tobacco companies became increasingly critical. And some states, including France's home state of Massachusetts, started running ads to try to prevent youth smoking. But then in 1998, after a long legal fight, something called the Master Settlement Agreement happened. And it took anti-smoking campaigns to a national level.

The master settlement agreement between 46 states and the large tobacco companies was really revolutionary. Every U.S. state besides Florida, Minnesota, Mississippi, and Texas was a signatory to the agreement. And those four also had their own individual tobacco settlements.

This was one of the biggest and strongest industries in the United States, and they had never before been challenged at this level. They signed an agreement that was thousands of pages long to put numerous restrictions on how tobacco companies could market their products overall, as well as committing a tremendous amount of spending to go to the 46 states to fight tobacco-related illnesses.

And a piece of that master settlement agreement was to address youth smoking and to set aside a certain amount of money to create the American Legacy Foundation. The American Legacy Foundation was an organization in Washington, D.C., that would spend settlement funds to try to cut down on youth smoking rates across the United States.

The ALF put out a request for proposals to design a national anti-smoking campaign aimed at youth. Fran's agency was already producing anti-smoking ads for the Massachusetts Department of Health. But getting a national contract would be huge. We were waiting for the day that they would put the national contract up for bid, and it would be one of the most desirable and hotly competed for contracts in all of the advertising industry.

Fran's agency, Arnold Worldwide, teamed up with another agency in Florida called CPB that was creating youth anti-smoking ads in that region. Together, they hashed out the pitch for a national campaign, putting in long hours and doing tons of research. Their research offered key insights to Fran's team about what anti-smoking messaging worked and what didn't, and how this campaign should be different.

The key challenge that we had in developing this work was, how do you effectively get to the teenagers who are most at risk? In our analysis of previous anti-smoking work, we felt that the biggest problem was the work was very rational and it was very grown up in a sense.

don't do this because it's going to hurt you. And what we realized when we started to do research amongst teenagers is that more than 50% of teens are probably never going to seriously think about smoking. They're athletes or they come from families where smoking is taboo. They're health conscious. And a lot of the traditional anti-smoking work appealed to those kids. It was the other half of kids who we called at-risk teens who

the ones that might have a gene in them that makes them more likely to be interested in smoking and rebelling against their parents, rebelling against adult supervision. So we spent most of our research studying the 35 to 40 percent of teenagers that we thought were most at risk. We did one-on-one interviews. We did focus groups. We did observational research. We also did surveys. And there was one question in a survey about teenagers

I'm a little bit angry and I'm probably going to get back at somebody someday. And at-risk teens indexed almost 400% on that question.

saying that they had a rebel gene in them and they were going to use it somehow. And the theory of our case was that tobacco had created products that made it a great product for teens to use to rebel against their parents and to rebel against authority and to prove their independence. And what we needed to do was to create an advertising campaign that would tap into that rebel gene in teenagers, in particularly teens who had a propensity to smoke.

and turn that power of rebellion against big tobacco. And that was the central idea of the Truth campaign. Fran's team poured everything into the Truth campaign pitch. Landing this contract would be huge. There's a real buzz inside an advertising agency. The average age in our agency was probably 27 or 28. We had more than 500 people in our agency. About 50 of them were working on this pitch for the American Legacy Foundation.

We used our creative director's office as our war room because this was one of the most important things we were doing. And his office looked like the inside of a construction site because he was always working on building new campaigns in there. And so throughout the day, we would have a research meeting and then we would have a finance meeting about the pitch. Then we would have a creative meeting about the pitch. And so the place was just really buzzing.

pretty much talking about this 24 hours a day until the big day arrived. It was finally time to make their high-stakes pitch to the American Legacy Foundation. So we were down in Washington, D.C. the night before getting ready for this, and I was upstairs. My team was downstairs at the hotel, and so I walked downstairs to have one final discussion with the team before our big Andy smoking pitch the next day, and to my surprise, half of the team was smoking in the bar.

And I walked in and said, guys, you can't be smoking down here. We're about to pitch the American Legacy Foundation. Their headquarters are upstairs and across the street. And our creative director, a gentleman named Pete Favotte, who's legendary in the industry, he said, well, Fran, this just proves what a difficult problem smoking is, that the whole anti-smoking team is sitting here smoking the night before the anti-smoking pitch. ♪

In many ways, that scene emphasized the high stakes. People who really knew just how horribly unhealthy smoking was were too hooked to quit themselves. But if the next generation could be prevented from ever starting, the future would be brighter. The next morning, the team made their pitch. It was a two-hour presentation and then an agonizing two-day wait to learn if they'd won the contract.

Finally, a call came from the American Legacy Foundation. My secretary informed me that Cheryl Hilton, the CEO of the American Legacy Foundation, was on the phone. And she says, this is a call that I'm very excited to make. I'd like to tell you that we are ready to hire Arnold and CPB to be the agency of record for the American Legacy Foundation. And congratulations to the whole team. Thank you.

Hundreds of people were packed into our lobby for us to announce that we had won the American Legacy Foundation account. It was a huge day for all of us. Fran and his team got to work right away producing the Truth campaign.

It was a multifaceted effort. They worked with youth ambassadors and ran print and radio and TV ads across the country. One of the most famous TV ads of the campaign was an emotionally intense spot called Body Bags.

The concept there is that roughly 1,200 people die of tobacco-related illnesses every day in the United States. It's about 600,000 people a year. So it's one thing to say, oh, we're fighting against smoking. It's another thing to say, we're trying to prevent as many as 1,200 deaths a day. Do you know how many people tobacco kills every day?

So one way to dramatically get that point across was for our team to surreptitiously pull up to the front door of one of the largest tobacco companies in the world.

And like an Army commando team, in the course of about two or three minutes to unload 1,200 full-sized body bags, deposit them on the sidewalk outside the headquarters of a major tobacco company, and then our youth ambassadors used megaphones to communicate to the people in the building and to ask folks if they knew what 1,200 people a day dying actually looked like.

And we filmed all this on the street level. We filmed it from a drone. We filmed it from up above. So by the time we were asked to leave the premises about 10 minutes later, we had shot this body bag commercial demonstrating 1,200 full-size body bags outside the offices of a company that sells a product that contributes to those kind of fatalities every year.

So that was a very shocking ad, but it was based on the truth. And that's what we felt people needed to hear. These younger truth ambassadors that we worked with really liked the idea of doing aggressive communication, using the truths of the smoking industry to try to get people to consider not smoking. The truth campaign, and particularly the body bag ad, were controversial and attention-grabbing.

Rather than cigarettes being framed as rebellious and cool, they flipped the script, depicting avoiding cigarettes as a rebellion against a manipulative industry.

Most great advertising campaigns, every brand in a sense needs an enemy. You're trying to communicate what's good about your product, but you're also trying to compare it to your competition or your enemy. And so in the case of the Truth campaign, we had a ready-made enemy in the large tobacco companies that were spending a lot of money to get people to smoke, which caused lots of health problems and lots of family destruction.

And in particular, using rebellion as a force for good instead of a force for evil was a great learning in the Truth Campaign. These teens had a need to rebel, and absent the Truth Campaign, they might have rebelled with a cigarette or smoking. In our case, we harnessed that rebellion to fight back against smoking in a very meaningful way. This tactic appeared to pay off. The post-campaign research was very encouraging.

At-risk teens noticed the campaign, perceived it positively, and saw it as a reason to not smoke, remembered the campaign at very high levels, much, much higher levels than we've seen many campaigns in different industries. And then very importantly, there was a large study done that showed that

The more at-risk teens had seen the Truth campaign, the more likely they were to not smoke. So there was a direct correlation between the amount of communication received by our target audience and having the desired effect of lowering their interest in smoking. Now, we know that correlation doesn't equal causation, but these data were very suggestive.

During the five-year campaign, independent researchers estimated that the number of young smokers, as well as projected future health care costs, plummeted, which many felt reflected the campaign's success. They estimated that the health savings would have ranged from anywhere from $2 billion to more than $5 billion. And those kind of savings will build over time as more and more people do not smoke. So when we started the Truth campaign, approximately 30% said

of high schoolers were regular smokers. And 10 years later, that was down to 15%.

And as the Truth Campaign has continued, the percentage of high schoolers who are regular smokers is now under 10%. So over the course of 20 years, we've gone from more than 30% to under 10%. And the communications work that has been done is credited with having a significant contribution to those improvements.

While there were many other efforts to reduce teen smoking, and smoking in general, and tax hikes as well as bans on smoking in restaurants and public spaces made a huge impact,

The Truth campaign is considered one of the most effective campaigns in advertising history. And it won some of the industry's highest awards, including an Effie Award, which recognizes effectiveness in marketing. I can remember getting 10, 12 phone calls the first day that the campaign was on air from friends and colleagues who basically said, wow, that is really shocking work. It's a different approach.

And it feels like it could be very powerful. So we got a lot of positive feedback from friends, family, researchers. The campaign remains iconic and a source of tremendous pride for Fran and many others who co-created it.

One of the beautiful things with the Truth campaign is you got feedback on it almost every day, no matter where you went, because it was one of the most visible TV campaigns of that decade. But you also saw it. The Truth advertising was the kind of advertising that teens would put up in their bedrooms. So if you're over visiting a friend's house, you would often get walked upstairs and you'd see the latest print ad up over somebody's bed.

There's no campaign that I've worked on that was more meaningful to me than the Truth campaign. It was a big win for our agency. And then the positive impact on real people and real lives was very, very gratifying. Fran Kelly is the president and CEO of a brand consulting firm called CEO View Branding. He previously was the CEO and president of Arnold Worldwide.

You can find links to Fran's website and the Truth Campaign TV ads in the show notes and at schwab.com slash podcast. The big insight that Fran Kelly and his team leveraged in the Truth Campaign was framing not smoking as a rebellious act against the manipulative and controlling force of the tobacco industry. It appears to have been incredibly effective, and many advertisers have tried to copy this creative strategy in the years since.

The aversion this campaign harnessed to being manipulated by an outside force, like Big Tobacco, can be seen in many other contexts as well. My next guest has done fascinating work around the negative and highly motivating response that emerges when people come to believe they're being pressured excessively, say, by Big Tobacco, to behave in a certain way.

Christopher Bryan is an associate professor of business, government, and society at the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business. He's here to talk about some of his research that relates to the story you just heard and how it can be used to help us make better choices.

Hi, Chris. Thank you so much for joining me today. Hey, Katie. I'm delighted to be here. Well, I am delighted to get to ask you some questions about a topic I know we both find really fascinating, which is reactants. Yeah. I want to just start by asking, could you define it? What is reactants? I guess the way I think about it is that reactants is...

our kind of natural instinctive impulse to reassert our autonomy when we feel that our choices are being controlled by something or someone on the outside in a way that we don't believe is legitimate. Great. So it's sort of saying, I'm going to buck

Yeah. Yeah.

Parents might think back to the definition I just gave and say, well, hold on, my authority is legitimate. But that's a little different from how adolescents understand it. Adolescents as a developmental stage exists so that people can figure out how to be independent social agents, make their own choices.

And so as people move through that developmental stage, things that parents think of as completely legitimate assertions of authority start to feel like they're too controlling. And so you'll get kids saying, no, I'm not going to clean my room or no, I won't eat that.

Right. And I think those are sort of really classic cases of reactants. Those are great examples. I will admit that as a parent of a child who has not yet hit adolescence, but who can see that coming, I am not looking forward to experiencing that. But Chris, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about some more situations where it would also be natural to see someone show reactants.

Yeah. So I think the example of adolescence is one. I think another really prominent example is a lot of the opposition to big government in American politics, I think really comes from a place of reactance. It comes from a place of feeling that the government is trying to, or in fact is, constraining my options in ways that I don't believe are legitimate and

And to some extent, just on principle, that upsets me. That makes me angry. In fact, I have a personal example. I don't think of myself, especially as a small government person in terms of my general political views, but I'm not a big fan of HOAs. And that's HOA is Homeowner Association, right? Am I getting that right? Yeah. Homeowners Association. That's right. Which sounds like a nice thing. And there are a lot of things that are nice about it. But one of the things that I don't like about it is that they have

restrictions on how you can use your property. And there's something about that that feels just unacceptably constraining to me, even though it doesn't really materially affect my life

Very often at all. And when it does, it does so in trivial ways, like I need to wait an extra couple of weeks to submit an application before I can make some improvement on my house. But just the knowledge that there was this governing body that had the power to restrict what I could do with my own home and property was upsetting enough to me that I decided I should join the board of my homeowners association so that I could at least have some control over that body that was controlling me.

It's also making me remember something that in my 20s drove me crazy, which is that my parents retired and they joined this club where you're not allowed to wear blue jeans. Yeah. And I wasn't supposed to wear them. And there was just no other time I really cared about wearing blue jeans except when we were going to this place that didn't allow them.

And what you just described really captures the phenomenon perfectly, because what I really kind of heard in what you said was I wanted to wear the blue jeans, not because I otherwise would have wanted to wear them, but because someone was telling me I couldn't. And that made me want it more than I would otherwise.

Yeah, exactly. And I think we've all been there. So what do we know about why people have this reaction to authority? What is it that triggers the desire to oppose a regulation or a constraint rather than just conforming? Because often we're happy to be cooperative and get along with others. So what's going on that triggers this reactance?

I think it's something really deeply embedded in our psychology. I think it's closely related to the desire for freedom. I mean, that's really what it comes down to is we feel that our freedom to make choices that we believe we should be free to make is being constrained. And that's deeply upsetting to us.

You can also make a pragmatic argument for it, which is we are responsible for our lives, right? We bear a lot of responsibility for our choices. And so the freedom to make the choices we think are the right choices is essential to being able to handle that responsibility in a way that's manageable and acceptable to us. I love that explanation.

So I want to pivot and talk a little bit about your recent amazing research on how reactants can actually be harnessed to

to improve decision-making. Because normally I think of reactants as this negative force that's causing people to reject. Well, of course it can be a positive force if it's causing people to reject oppression, but it can also cause people to reject reasonable policies or reasonable constraints imposed by their parents, for instance. But you came up with a way to take this insight that reactants

is a powerful force and that it drives behavior and use it to actually improve healthy eating among adolescents. So could you talk a little bit about that work?

Absolutely. So the basic insight behind this work, and I should say this all started when my close friend and frequent collaborator David Yeager and I did some consulting work for Disney in which we were trying to help them design an attraction that would make families want to make healthy choices, like eat healthy foods, drink lots of water, that sort of thing. And so we were discussing this and we were thinking like, all right, but

The problem is that we want to eat a bunch of junk food and we want to sit on the couch instead of going out and playing a lot of the time. And how do we encourage young people and their families to reject that strong temptation? And one of the first thoughts we had about that was if it doesn't feel like it's coming from within, if it feels like it's something being imposed on us from the outside, we won't feel like we have to justify it.

Right. We won't feel like we have to defend it. But then the more we sort of walked down that path, we realized, actually, it's even better than that. Not only do we not feel like we have to defend it, we feel like it's some outside influence constraining our choices. And that's a thing we find upsetting.

And so if we can successfully help young people to see those temptations as being triggered in us by crafty villains, in this case, it was a fantastical Disney scenario, then that might just do the trick. That might just get them excited about fighting back against it. And we found that doing that, even in this obviously and clearly fictional fantastical scenario, it

got kids excited about it. And they went and they were more likely to go and buy a fruit cup and a bottle of water than to go buy an ice cream sandwich and a soda.

And so we thought, well, what if we just did this outside of a theme park context? Could we just tell adolescents about all of this stuff? Tell them about the ways in which food marketers are manipulating them into eating junk food and causing very real harm in the process.

And might that be enough to get adolescents to think, well, I don't want to be a part of this. I don't want to be a pawn in these guys' game. I want to make my own choices. If I'm remembering correctly, you pitted that against sort of more a traditional technique, which is telling people these are the healthy foods you should eat more of, right? Which I thought was a really clever element of the study was saying, you know, we have a way we normally approach convincing kids to eat healthy food. Let's see if we can do better by harnessing reactants. Yeah.

And so we conspired with an incredibly supportive and helpful middle school principal to, you

use one of the food giveaways that he already does regularly, giving kids a party or a snack pack as sort of a celebration slash thank you for all the work the students were putting in to prepare for the state tests that are so important in determining the resources that schools get access to and that sort of thing. And so he said, if you want, you guys can just take over that party and administer it any way you want. And so we thought, perfect.

Two days after the kids had been exposed to all this information about the controlling manipulation of food marketers, we had homeroom teachers distribute an order form where kids were asked to circle

two out of five possible snack options, and one out of four or five possible drink options. And the options included really unhealthy things like hot Cheetos and Doritos and healthy things like cut fruit and trail mix and that sort of thing. And the drink options included really unhealthy things like soda or heavily sweetened fruit drinks. And they included things like regular bottled water or bubbly water.

And what we found was that kids who had been exposed to what we call the expose treatment, the one that explained to adolescents all the ways in which the food marketers were trying to control them and others, got kids to make significantly healthier choices online.

On average, then instead being exposed to the sort of standard health course curriculum that focused on how to know what's healthy, how to read a nutrition label and how to understand the effects of what you eat on your long term health.

It's really, really neat. Okay, let's turn away from the research for a little bit and just talk a bit about what are the applications in day-to-day life for our listeners. So when you think about all of this research and all the time you have spent understanding reactants and how it can be harnessed for good and how it can cause bad behavior as well, I'm curious if you have takeaways and things that you do differently in your life because you now understand reactants.

Yeah, I think the sort of higher level lesson that I've taken from the work I've done on this and just the amount of time I've spent thinking about this has been to recognize that the way to get other people to do what you're hoping they'll do is almost never to make them feel stupid or bad for what they're currently doing instead.

Because when you make people feel stupid or bad for what they're doing now, then they can't afford to conclude that you're right. Because your request for how they change their behavior is coming with a poison pill for their self-regard. It's coming with the message that...

And you're a bad person for not already doing that. And so it's really helped me to focus on understanding the reasons why people are doing things that are different from what I hope they might do. A lot of my work is focused on helping people find the motivation to change their behavior in beneficial ways. And so that's one thing. And the other thing is I'm a parent of five kids and a bunch of them are either in or right on the precipice of adolescence. And

And I have already seen very clear evidence that simply asserting my authority is not getting me where I need to go. And so instead, I need to reason with them. I need to be open to being persuaded by them, right? They want to feel that they have agency too. Fundamentally, reactance is the sort of rejection of the constraining of our agency, right?

And if you understand it that way and you can begin to catch yourself without even meaning to a lot of times seeming to, if not in fact, constrain other people's autonomy and agency, then you're likely to avoid a lot of pushback, a lot of negative reactions. And I've certainly found that in my life.

I love that. And I actually think that's a wonderful place to wrap up. So let me just thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Katie. It's been a pleasure for me too. Christopher Bryan is an associate professor of business, government, and society at the University of Texas at Austin's McComb School of Business. You can find links to his research on psychological reactants in the show notes and at schwab.com slash podcast.

For help decoding complex financial concepts and the specific decisions we make in our financial lives, including how the phenomenon we explore on Choiceology might impact your portfolio, check out our sister podcast, Financial Decoder. You can find it at schwab.com slash financial decoder or wherever you get your podcasts.

Psychological reactance is a powerful force that shapes many of our decisions, not just in adolescence. A classic example given to illustrate reactance is this: Think about how you'd feel if someone told you not to press a large red button. You'd start itching to press it, right?

In some recent research led by my PhD student Sophia Pink, we've shown that encouraging people to defy constraining stereotypes can also have benefits, just as it's beneficial to encourage people to defy manipulative industries like big tobacco.

In our study, we encouraged women in executive roles to defy the social stereotype that women are less competitive than men and to apply for more high-level openings on an exclusive job application website. Compared to encouraging women to apply for more jobs merely to improve their outcomes, encouraging them to apply for more jobs to defy the stereotype that they're less competitive than men yielded better results. So what does this all mean for you?

I hope you'll leave with two takeaways. First, reactants is a powerful energizer. When you feel it, you should recognize it. And when you recognize it, you can more easily talk yourself down from having a hot reaction that won't serve you well. Recognizing reactants might help you avoid losing your cool at the beachfront store manager who's told you you'll have to put on shoes to enter his shop, for example. And it might help you be more civil to the flight attendant who has just reminded you to buckle up.

Second, understanding reactants can help you be a more persuasive person. And we all could stand to be a bit more persuasive, whether we have adolescent children or not. You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or feedback wherever you listen. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app.

And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book, How to Change, or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, on Substack. Next time, the story of how a certain type of storytelling can help bring more meaning and purpose into your life. And you'll hear the remarkable story of Dr. David Fagenbaum's quest for the cure to his own disease. I'm Dr. Katie Milkman. Talk to you soon.

For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com slash podcast.