If you live in the U.S., you've probably seen
warning labels on products like these.
A warning label is a label designed to inform
consumers about a potential risk.
The more graphic, the more colorized the message.
It does change people's minds.
But here's the thing. Researchers aren't
convinced warning labels actually work.
One of my main complaints about warnings is that
they've become ubiquitous. With
everything in the supermarket is labeled as
dangerous, you don't know what to buy.
We're such a litigious society, and because of
that, we have unnecessary warnings.
Warning labels by themselves is just not
effective. They really need to be coupled with
safe design.
There's some controversy, I think, particularly in
the U.S., because it's a deep value we have, the
value of free choice and liberty.
And so when someone smacks a warning label on
something, we feel like our liberties have been
imposed despite the fact that we're still free to
purchase that item.
So why are warning labels so scary and do they even
work?
There are many different types of warning labels,
but let's split them up into two categories:
'think twice before buying' and 'be careful
using this.' 'Think twice' labels are trying
to warn the consumer that they may want to
reconsider buying this.
So an example could be this product was
manufactured in a facility that also
processes peanuts, which is a known allergen.
'Be careful while using this' is trying to
anticipate basically anything a person could do
wrong with the product.
A plastic bag could be dangerous to a child.
This should not be used as infant formula, and
this one involves electricity, so a lot of
things can go wrong.
Some types of warning labels work, and the
reason why they work is, in part, because they make
people feel bad.
They make people pause and think about the
negative health consequences.
Warning labels really were fairly rare until the
1960s. So until then, about the only products
meriting a warning label were dangerous chemicals
such as sulfuric acid that would be labeled
poison or prescription drugs.
But beginning in the mid 1960s, cigarettes started
to have a warning label, and since that time other
products have followed suit trying to emulate the
cigarette experience.
One of the reasons for this rise is in 1986,
California passed ballot initiative, Proposition
65, into law, which required consumer products
to declare warnings about "chemicals known to the
state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity."
The two kinds of labels that were mandated, labels
for carcinogens and labels for reproductive
toxicants. The carcinogens include
anything that would cause cancer, the over 70-year
lifetime of daily exposure.
So it now includes 800 chemicals on the list and
the reproductive toxicants include
everything that would affect the growth of the
fetus. So it created a lot of hysteria among
firms because almost everything is potentially
a carcinogen or a reproductive toxicant.
A coffee, for example, has many carcinogens in
coffee, but they're very small and what you want to
do is distinguish really tiny risks from larger
risks.
This has made it difficult for consumers to
distinguish between big risks and small ones.
Experts recommend that companies scale back on
warning labels that involve modest risk.
Researchers also want to know what makes an
effective warning label.
Leslie John did a study to see what it would take
to make people think twice about buying sugary
drinks.
What we did was we worked with a couple of
convenience stores in San Francisco and we varied
the labels that accompanied the sugary
drinks, and every couple of weeks we'd switch up
the labels and we measured, each week,
sales. And what we found, it was only these graphic
warning labels that curbed people's purchasing
of sugary drinks. So the text label didn't do
anything and I think that's partly because
people kind of already know this, but when you
show it graphically, it elicits emotion and
feeling, and it's the feeling that really moves
us to take pause at our actions.
The graphic warning labels decreased people's
propensity to buy sugary drinks by about 15%.
I've developed what I think are criteria for
when they will work.
First, they have to provide new information.
They have to be convincing, so they have
to be credible.
When companies are making statements against their
financial interest, that would tend to be credible.
When we do see labels that work, it's probably driven
by lots of things. But I would surmise that some of
it may also be driven by surprise, by salience.
This is a new weird thing, and so it catches
your attention and so you're more likely to pay
attention to it and it's more likely to affect you.
The 'be careful with this' warning labels may not be
effective either.
No one's reading a book before they use a product,
especially if it's a product that's easy to
use, intuitive to use, or where they can generalize
use. In other words, they've used a product
similar enough that they can figure it out.
You and I have probably seen hundreds of warning
labels in the last week and we probably don't
remember any of them. And that's the problem with
just relying on warning labels.
They're the icing on the cake rather than the end
all be all. As consumers, when we buy product from
online or in a store, we assume that they're safe
and we assume that they've been vetted for
safety. That's not always true.
Sometimes it's not possible to eliminate the
hazard. For example, you can't take the flame out
of a lighter or you're not going to light your
grill. There's something called the safety
hierarchy, and the safety hierarchy first begins
with designing out the risk.
So making sure that you're either eliminating
the risk completely, and then from there, if it's
not possible to design this risk out, it's really
about guarding against it, and that's like a
physical guard or like a procedural, like the
example of a lawn mower.
On my own lawn mower, I have to press a button and
pull a lever for it to run.
And the last tier is actually warning labels.
If you can't guard against it, you can't
eliminate it completely, then you warn.
There's not attempt to convey information
succinctly, it's really an attempt to cover
yourself against all the potential lawsuits and
problems that might arise, which is not that
effective.
The FDA is responsible for regulating things like
food and tobacco products, but the Consumer
Product Safety Commission or the CPSC doesn't have
the same authority to subject consumer products
to the same rigorous standards.
Under the Consumer Product Safety Act, the CPSC
generally needs to rely on voluntary standards
before they can create any mandatory standard.
And these voluntary standards are created in a
consensus-based environment where the
process is about bringing together industry
manufacturers, third-party testers,
consumer organizations, consumers, doctors, and
anybody else who wants to participate, they can.
ASTM is a standards development organization
that facilitates the development of voluntary
consensus standards.
So they bring together stakeholders who are
interested in developing a voluntary standard.
The CPSC is required by Congress to first work
through the voluntary standards process to
develop standards for products before moving on
to developing a regulation. And they can
move on to a regulation if one of three conditions
occurs. One is if they go to stakeholders and say,
'hey, we think a voluntary standard is
needed,' and if stakeholders come back
manufacturers and say, 'no, we're not doing it,'
then CPSC can proceed.
Or if industry and stakeholders say, 'yes, we
are going to proceed and develop a voluntary
standard,' and they develop one, but it's not
stringent enough to address the key hazards,
then CPSC can move forward with the
regulation. Or thirdly, if they develop a
voluntary standard and it is stringent enough to
address the key hazards, but they aren't seeing
compliance in the field, then CPSC can move
forward.
One safety issue that has led to regulation is
furniture tipping over, especially onto children.
CPSC has documented nearly 200
tip-over-related child fatalities between January
2000 and April 2022.
Now, there is a federal law called the Sturdy Act,
which was adopted into a mandatory safety standard
in April 2023.
It's currently in the transition to being
implemented across industry.
The Sturdy Act is a prime example of how warning
labels work really well with the strong standard,
but alone would be insufficient.
So everybody wants to do what they can to keep
dressers safe. There's just been a lot of
questions around what that actually means.
So it's really about the devil in the details.
There are good players, good actors and
manufacturers that are trying really hard to make
sure that they build a very stable dresser, but
there are also bad players who might be
trying to skirt the system because before
sturdy act, it was a voluntary standard.
And so you might get that one manufacturer that's
trying to cut a corner and save a little bit of
money by using a less stable design and putting
people at risk. So really Sturdy is very good at
making sure that everybody is playing by
the same rules.
Warning labels may also help companies' bottom
lines.
Companies often put warnings on products to
cover themselves with potential litigation.
So it's not necessarily to inform consumers, but
to try to head off a potential complaint down
the road.
The warning label from the U.S., as most people know
who have seen cigarette packs, is this small
little warning label says the tobacco industry was
lobbying for this.
The label does not have any noticeable impact on
public health and smoking, but provides a
very handy legal defense in a court case in case
the tobacco industry is sued for wrongful death.
Vasquez's research shows that cigarette warning
labels don't do much to change consumer behavior,
which hasn't really hurt companies' bottom lines.
And what I found is that there was no effect of the
warning labels, any of the different graphic
warning labels in terms of improving consumer
comprehension. You can find survey evidence that
says if you ask people, show them a graphic
warning label, does this make you think more about
quitting? And they'll say yes.
But in terms of actually affecting smoking
behavior, no evidence in any country that they've
shifted smoking behavior.
It has been used as a defense in a court of law.
'Well, see, there was this warning label.
You should have known.
You assumed the risk.' This is the assumption of
risk argument.
Some people feel like certain warning labels are
an unnecessary overreach, and a federal court
recently agreed.
The FDA proposed new graphics, health warning
labels for cigarette packets in 2019 at the
direction of Congress.
These labels would take up at least 50% of the
front and back of the pack and would make it
more comparable to what more than 120 countries
require displayed on their cigarette packs.
Tobacco companies challenged the regulation
in court and they won.
The FDA did an analysis that they coupled with
their regulatory proposal analyzing the effect of
the warning label in Canada, smoking prevalence
rate. They said there's no effect, nothing there.
So this then reached the D.C.
Circuit and the D.C.
Circuit said the regulation doesn't
accomplish anything.
It limits what companies are allowed to put of
their product so they overturn this proposal.
The judge is essentially making a First Amendment
argument. He wrote that while the government can
require companies to include warnings, if it is
purely factual and uncontroversial
information, the government cannot use this
sort of imagery because "the image may convey one
thing to one person and a different thing to
another." But there's also the argument that
warning labels may backfire.
The graphic warning labels, they don't want
them to elicit so much shame and negative affect
that people turn away.
So there's something called an ostrich effect
where people just, it makes them feel so badly
that they turn off and it can even cause reactance
where they kind of do the opposite because they're
like, 'oh, you're trying to manipulate me.
I'll show you.' It needs to be strong enough to
make people think twice and capture their
attention, but it can't be so strong as to really
turn people off.
So the goal isn't to completely eliminate
warning labels. The goal is to make sure that
people, companies, consumers, whoever, don't
solely rely on warning labels because the main
responsibility for anyone or for any manufacturer is
to make sure that their product is safe.