The traffic lights have been red forever. The driver takes another hit on his oversized cigar. The second-hand smoke fills the interior of his oversized car, which in turn fills the street with its own noxious emissions. An elderly couple wave their heads in disapproval at the smoking driver and his smoking car. Then the lights turn green and everybody drives past a 64-foot billboard.
From smoking in malls to water and air quality, people regularly vocalise concerns about their physical environment. Even noise pollution is frequently complained about. Less concern is expressed about psychological pollution.
Probably the most ubiquitous examples of psychological pollutants are the unsolicited outdoor advertisements that bombard us daily as we move around our cities. I think of outdoor adverts as environmental spam, real-world pop-ups – unsolicited, very annoying and impossible to close down.
Driver distraction is one of the leading causes for road accidents. Billboards and other forms of outdoor advertisement are engineered to attract attention. Research published in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention confirms this commonsense notion that advertisements have a negative impact on driving behaviour.
Beyond road incidents, advertisement images are often implicated in the onset of psychological disorders.
Similarly, when people are encouraged to make upwards social comparisons, that is when they compare themselves to people who are richer, smarter or more beautiful, they tend to experience negative emotions (dysphoria) and experience higher rates of clinical depression.
Furthermore, it is not hard to appreciate that if we bombard people with advertisements for high-fat, calorie-dense foods, then they may begin to develop “diabetagenic” eating behaviours.
For me, however, the main issue with outdoor advertising is that you are forced to soak it up, just like second-hand smoke in a bad restaurant. However, unlike smoke, outdoor advertising is increasingly crafted and targeted with precision.
I was recently at CeBIT in Hanover, the world’s foremost trade show for the digital industry. One of the products I played with there was a state of the art emotion-detection device. It can read the emotional expression registered on the faces of people viewing a screen or billboard.
To test it out I pulled every emotional face I had in my repertoire, and the software got it right each time. More impressive still, this system can simultaneously process crowds of faces. I asked the vendor who might buy such a device. “Outdoor advertisers and people in the movie business,” came the reply.
Given the advances in advertising, the curtailing of outdoor ad campaigns is warranted.
In 2007, Sao Paulo, South America’s largest city, passed the “clean city law”, banning all outdoor advertising: no billboards, no neon signs, not even smiling faces on the sides of busses.
A little extreme perhaps, but Sao Paulo demonstrated that it was possible to improve a city’s psychological environment, at least the visual aspect of it. In recent years, Paris cut outdoor adverts by 30 per cent. Similarly, several US states (Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont) have placed serious restrictions on outdoor advertising, as has Chennai in India and Auckland in New Zealand.
As I drive along Sheikh Zayed Road, heading to Dubai, every bridge I pass under is screaming for my valuable attention and from the roadside colourful advertisements seductively call out to me in English and Arabic.
Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University and author of Psychological Well-Being in the Gulf States
On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas
