Robert Cialdini: Advertisement Analysis

This piece will discuss the theory presented in the piece written by Robert Cialdini about how certain factors affect the effectiveness of environmental public service announcements. I will also apply the ideas presented by Cialdini into a real life situation. In Cialdini’s piece, he uses two important real life examples of how public service announcements have proven either successful or proven to have conflicting messages that compete with one another, rendering the overall goal ineffective. As Cialdini writes, there are two types of norms: descriptive norms, which are social norms that are the most commonly acted on and injunctive norms, which are typically approved or disapproved by society. Cialdini explained how one certain public service announcement used both types of norms to create a message that was overall ineffective. As Cialdini wrote, the famous Iron Eyes Cody public service announcement depicted a Native American man shedding a single tear that represented society disapproving the act of littering. Although this seems as though it should be effective in preventing littering and destroying the environment, the ad also showed that the problem of littering in public spaces is a common occurrence. Therefore, the two social norms competed with one another and basically …show more content…
We can also promote using environmentally friendly products that won't harm our water supply and sea life with microbeads. Whatever the morally appropriate option is, we should use that for our next campaign to stop pollutions. Injunctive norms are our primary tool to advancing our agenda to prevent pollution. The only instance in which we can use both injunctive and descriptive norms is if they are working positively and absolutely do not compete with one another. With these tactics, we will have a successful campaign against