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A fear appeal is a communication tactic designed to scare people into adopting desired behaviors (e.g. wash hands to avoid contracting COVID-19). While it is generally acknowledged that fear appeals can be persuasive at motivating behavior, this paper aims to identify how to optimally identify how to optimally frame the focal threat to increase their effectiveness as well as to uncover additional underlying processes.

The authors conducted four experimental studies.

This research validates that exposure to fear appeals can strongly motivate behavior. However, this study shows that this effect is moderated by threat specificity. Specifically, this study demonstrates that people are more motivated to engage in behaviors that facilitate threat avoidance after exposure to a personally relevant threat that represents a nonspecific (e.g. aging appearance) rather than a specific outcome (e.g. wrinkles). This effect is mediated by perceptions of assimilation (versus contrast) to the focal threat. This study reliably shows the effect across three threat domains (i.e. aging appearance, weight gain, illness) and for different behaviors.

Theoretically speaking, this study contributes to the fear appeal literature by identifying a new type of message framing that has the potential to increase fear appeal’s persuasive power, and uncovering a distinct mechanism by which fear appeals impact behavior. Practically speaking, the findings confirm that fear appeals have the potential to help marketers mobilize consumer behavior, especially when the communication highlights a nonspecific rather than specific threat.

Globally, around one-third of food produced is wasted and thrown into supermarket bins or dumpsters. As a result, these dumpsters have become opportunistic sources of food through dumpster diving. The authors' scoping review aimed to document the people that are dumpster diving and why these people engage in this potentially illegal practice.

A database search spanning 12 years yielded 29 articles for review.

The authors' analysis uncovered two main themes for why people were dumpster diving: (1) motivations which included political activism against consumerism, materialism and capitalism, a fun and thrilling social activity and to alleviate food insecurity and (2) the benefits derived, such as gaining free food, saving money, sharing food with others and gaining attention from the public and media.

In conclusion, the review was unable to provide definitive information on “who” was dumpster diving; however, this limitation provides a unique opportunity for further research that focusses on the specific demographics of dumpster divers rather than the “why” people are diving.