The ethics of psychoactive ads

Many of today's ads work by arousing the viewer's emotions. Although emotion-arousing ads are widely used and are commonly thought to be effective, their careless use produces a side-effect: the psychoactive ad. A psychoactive ad is any emotion-arousing ad that can cause a meaningful, well...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Hyman, Michael R. (Author) ; Tansey, Richard (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Check availability: HBZ Gateway
Interlibrary Loan:Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany)
Published: 1990
In: Journal of business ethics
Year: 1990, Volume: 9, Issue: 2, Pages: 105-114
Further subjects:B Ethical Issue
B Tentative Guideline
B Economic Growth
Online Access: Volltext (JSTOR)
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:Many of today's ads work by arousing the viewer's emotions. Although emotion-arousing ads are widely used and are commonly thought to be effective, their careless use produces a side-effect: the psychoactive ad. A psychoactive ad is any emotion-arousing ad that can cause a meaningful, well-defined group of viewers to feel extremely anxious, to feel hostile toward others, or to feel a loss of self-esteem. We argue that, because some ill-conceived psychoactive ads can cause harm, ethical issues must arise during their production. Current pretesting methods cannot identify the potentially psychoactive ads; therefore, we offer some tentative guidelines for reducing the number of viewers harmed by psychoactive ads.
ISSN:1573-0697
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/BF00382660