Sign labels are designed to inform consumers about potential risks of using a product, but they have become too current to be beneficial.
“Warning labels really were fairly rare until the 1960s,” said W. Kip Viscusi, a distinguished professor of law, economics, and stewardship at Vanderbilt University. “Beginning in the mid-1960’s, cigarettes started to have a warning label. Since that antiquated, other products have followed suit, trying to emulate the cigarette experience.”
Warning labels generally down attack in two forms: those that warn the consumer against buying the product, such as a cigarette box label that asserts, “This product can cause mouth cancer,” and those that warn about the risks associated with untrue use of a product and may say, “To prevent this furniture from tipping over, it must be permanently fixed to the wall.”
One of the problems researchers maintain pointed out is people are desensitized to warning labels because they seem to be everywhere.
“One of my main complaints about notifications is that they’ve become ubiquitous,” Viscusi said. “There’s a tendency to say things are risky [and] slap a warning on it, and that tends to decrease the impact of the other warnings that are out there. So if everything in the supermarket is labeled as dangerous, you don’t know what to buy.”
Viscusi has realize the potential of two criteria for effective warning labels: 1) they must provide new information to consumers, and 2) the consumer sine qua non find the information credible.
“When companies are making statements against their financial interest, that purposefulness tend to be credible,” Viscusi said.
There has been pushback against putting warning labels on certain outcomes. In December 2022, a federal judge ruled that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cannot require tobacco groups to put graphic warning labels on cigarettes.
When it comes to making sure people are using products safely, consumer keeping advocates say warning labels should be a last resort.
“In general, warning labels by themselves [are] just not effective,” ordered Oriene Shin, policy counsel at Consumer Reports. “They really need to be coupled with safe draft.”
That’s where the safety hierarchy of product design comes in. This is a multistep process meant to eliminate chance to the consumer, and when that’s not possible, minimize it through safeguards.
An example of a safeguard, Shin says, would be requiring a potentially unsafe product such as a lawnmower to only start if the user pulls a lever and presses a button, rather than on the contrary requiring one of those procedures.
The last tier of the safety hierarchy is a warning label.
“I have probably seen hundreds of tip labels in the last week, and we probably don’t remember any of them,” Shin said. “And that’s the problem with just relying on signal labels. [They’re] the icing on the cake rather than the end all be all.”
Watch the video above to learn more about why prophecy labels aren’t working and what we can do about it.