Advertising Lowers Self and Social-Efficacy

Advertising is everywhere and in just one day, the average person is exposed to over 3500 marketing messages (Gibson, 2005). Messages can be anything from advertising the new perfume to recruitment services. However, has anyone noticed how adverts can effect self and social-efficacy in a negative way? To begin, we must first understand these concepts; self efficacy is one's own ability to succeed in a specific situation. Socially efficacious seek out social relationships that provide models on how to manage difficult situations and bring satisfaction to people's lives (Bandura, 1986).

So does advertising lower self-efficacy and social-efficacy? There are many examples to support the claim that it does. Fear appeals are incredibly popular within health adverts such as anti-smoking and drink driving ads. These are designed to scare the audience by demonstrating a potential serious threat (Grimsley, 2015). The most effective response to these ads are those who believe that the threat is high to them and believe they can effectively engage with the action; danger control response. It's clear that self-efficacy can play a role in peoples decisions but how? Psychologist Bandura created Social Cognitive theory which suggests that if individuals do not believe they have the ability to change their desired behaviour, they have little incentive to. Manyiwa and Brennan (2012) provides support in that he found within anti-smoking adverts, greater self-efficacy is associated with a more positive response to fear appeals. Basically, those who believe they have the ability

to quit smoking will be effected by the advert and attempt to quit. However, for those who do not posses such high self-efficacy will struggle and the advert may have a negative effect upon their behaviour and emotion. Believing that they do not poses the attributes to change their behaviour may lead to illnesses such as anxiety

and even depression (Moghadam and Tahmassian, 2011). Depression may then cause people to become socially isolated and in turn have social inefficacy.

Body image is an important aspect in today's society with 63% of women and 74% of men feeling truly satisfied with their body. More shockingly, 42% of 7 year olds want to be thinner (Vaynshteyn, 2014). However, 3/4 of adults think that society pots too much pressure on females in particular to have a 'perfect' body image. But is there such thing as a 'perfect' body image? An increasing number of adverts promote dietary products, weight loss and even products such as perfume and underwear that incorporate the 'idealized man or women'. Even though most of these adverts are photo shopped in some aspect, people still want that image and if this cannot be reached, people can begin to form body dissatisfaction (Van den Berg, 2007). Those who have body dissatisfaction have been found to have low self-efficacy and therefore do not believe they have the ability to lose weight or look better (Melton, 2014). It could also affect their social-efficacy in that they may believe that their friends look closer to the 'perfect' body than them and so stop going out with them.

Figure 1. Calvin Klein Underwear Advert (2014)

Although there are examples as to how advertising exploits and lowers self and social efficacy, there are also arguments into why it doesn't and actually it benefits those with low efficacy. Recruitment advertisements aim to encourage the unemployed to contact the service to help find them a job. Battista and Thompson (1996) found that those with higher self-efficacy were more likely to be active job seekers. This seems like an understandable finding as those with low self-efficacy would be expected to believe they do not have the ability to find a job so do not attempt it. James (2007) reports that the primary aim of a recruitment service such as jobcentre's is to increase self-efficacy of jobseekers. These adverts may also be beneficial for social- efficacy in that it encourages people who are successful in finding a job using this service to tell others and may even help to increase others self-efficacy. However, it may be difficult for people to reach the stage of joining a recruitment service. The majority of recruitment adverts specify the key skills needed for the role, if someone doesn't feel like they fit the role their self-efficacy may be reduced even

more and may prevent them from looking for other job roles.

Many companies including large chains such as McDonalds use toys as an incentive for purchasing their products. Typically there are about eight toys to collect over four weeks and as a child, it's incredibly important for them to have all the toys, for the parents it's not so much so. However, this concept encourages children to engage with others if they are also collecting the toys as it allows them to have the opportunity to swap and exchange toys. This could lead to the children increasing their social-efficacy and may be to increase it further in the future with the development of new friends. In terms of a child's development, this can help engage with others and reduce the risk of social isolation as they are able to 'fit in' with the other children who collect these toys. Taking McDonalds as an example, 10% of their sales comes from their happy meals (Celentano, 2015) which means they provide children with a lot of toys! This form of advertising can be seen as quite a manipulative form of advertising and may be criticised. Research has provided evidence to suggest that children will chose a certain meal over another if it is paired with a toy (Hobbin, 2012). It could be seen as a form of advertising that effects a child's social-efficacy and self-efficacy in that if a child cannot collect all the toys, they may believe they will not ever have the ability to collect them all especially if they friends have done so. This is particularly important if a child is in competition to collect them all, if they do not it can damage their self and social-efficacy significantly (Bandura, 1994).

So does advertising lower self and social-efficacy? The simple answer would be yes, however this depends on someone's social-efficacy to begin with. Although, advertising is used to persuade, it can easily persuade people they just don't cut it.

Fig. 2 Despicable Me 2 Happy Meal (2013)

References

Bandura, A. (1986). The Explanatory and Predictive Scope of Self-Efficacy Theory. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 4(3), pp.359-373.

Bandura, A. (1994). Self-efficacy. In V. S. Ramachaudran (Ed.), Encyclopedia of human behavior (Vol. 4, pp. 71-81). New York: Academic Press. (Reprinted in H. Friedman [Ed.], Encyclopedia of mental health. San Diego: Academic Press, 1998).

Battista, M., & Thompson, D. E. (1996). Motivation for reemployment: The role of self-efficacy and identity. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, San Diego, CA.

Celentano, D. (2015). The Role of McDonald's Happy Meals. [online] About.com Money. Available at: http://foodbeverage.about.com/od/Consumers/qt/Mcdonalds-Happy-Meals.htm [Accessed 13 Apr. 2015].

Gibson, O. (2005). Shopper's eye view of ads that pass us by. [online] the Guardian. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/nov/19/advertising.marketingandpr [Accessed 12 Apr. 2015].

Grimsley, S. (2015). Fear Appeal in Advertising: Theory, Examples & Quiz | Study.com. [online] Study.com. Available at: http://study.com/academy/lesson/fear-appeal-in-advertising-theory-examples-quiz.html [Accessed 13 Apr. 2015].

Hobin EP, Hammond DG, Daniel S, Hanning RM, Manske S. The Happy Meal® Effect: The impact of toy premiums on healthy eating among children in Ontario, Canada. Can J Public Health. Jul-Aug 2012;103(4):e244-248.

James, (2007). [online] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/264917/rrep726.pdf [Accessed 10 Apr. 2015].

Manyiwa, S. and Brennan, R. (2012). Fear appeals in anti-smoking advertising: How important is self-efficacy?. Journal of Marketing Management, 28(11-12), pp.1419-1437.

Melton, A. (2015). Perceive to believe: The relationship between body image, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and age in women. [online] Available at: http://gradworks.umi.com/36/26/3626101.html [Accessed 9 Apr. 2015].

Tahmassian,, K. and Moghadam, N. (2011). Relationship Between Self-Efficacy and Symptoms of Anxiety, Depression, Worry and Social Avoidance in a Normal Sample of Students. Iran J Psychiatry Behavioural Sciences, [online] 5(2). Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3939966/ [Accessed 7 Apr. 2015].

van den Berg, P., Paxton, S., Keery, H., Wall, M., Guo, J. and Neumark-Sztainer, D. (2007). Body dissatisfaction and body comparison with media images in males and females. Body Image, 4(3), pp.257-268.

Vaynshteyn, G. (2014). Why Photoshop is More Deadly Than You Thought. [online] HelloGiggles. Available at: http://hellogiggles.com/photoshop-deadly-thought/ [Accessed 14 Apr. 2015].

Illustrations

Figure 1. Calvin Klein Underwear Advert (2014) [Poster] At: http://pixshark.com/calvin-klein-ad-2014.htm (Accessed 14 Apr. 2015).

Figure 2. Despicable Me 2 Happy Meal (2013) [Poster] At: http://imgarcade.com/1/mcdonalds-happy-meal-advertisement-2013/ (Accessed 14 Apr. 2015).