Environment
Made You Look! - continued
By Bruce Grierson published Jul 1, 2009
The familiar becomes invisible. That’s why signs on the North Shore feature rhinos and dead bodies
"I just did a case that settled in Canada where a poor little 10-year-old girl dived into a lake and became paralyzed," says Michael Wolgater, a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University and a renowned "warnings" researcher. Wolgater is often called on as an expert witness by plaintiffs-the injured party-in negligence cases. In this case he was hired by the attorney for the girl's family. Where that girl dived, Wolgater argues, "there should be signs that say, You Could Be Paralyzed. Good pictorials actually show the head hitting the bottom. I've seen one go so far as to show a wheelchair." Consequence information works, the literature suggests-in as much as it makes people think about being more cautious and sometimes actually behave more cautiously. The more vivid and explicit the warning, evidence suggests, the more cautious people become.
In ski areas, Haegeli suggests pairing the two emotionally charged techniques. "At a choice point where you have to make a challenging move you put up a sign and you show a consequence: like a photo of an avalanche that has happened right there. When people can directly relate their action to that sign, the connection will be a lot stronger." A similar strategy is in place in North Vancouver's Lynn Canyon, near the suspension bridge, where the cliffs over the deep water invite intrepid, drunk teens to try their luck (knowing, or not, about the whirlpools that form under the waterfalls and suck swimmers to their death.) There are plenty of signs blaring dire warnings: Danger. Extreme Hazard. But there are also these: little memorial gravestones with the names and expiration dates of young people who made an irremediably bad choice.
