Feeling uncomfortable? That might be the point.

When discomfort drives behaviour change: what research tells us about campaigns that unsettle

Most communication work is built around a desire to welcome, reassure and engage. Campaigns for social and environmental causes are no exception. We reach for warmth, optimism, and the conviction that change is possible. Yet some of the most effective campaigns of recent years have done the exact opposite: they have made their audiences uneasy on purpose. This is not a new instinct, but research is beginning to give us a clearer picture of why it works, and more precisely, under what conditions.

The attention problem

Getting noticed is only the first battle. Organisations working on complex or sensitive issues know that awareness alone rarely changes behaviour. People can receive a message, understand it, even agree with it, and still do nothing. The harder question is what moves someone from understanding to action.

This is where deliberate discomfort plays a specific role. When a message unsettles, it creates a state of heightened attention that is difficult to ignore and harder to forget. Discomfort signals that something is wrong, out of order, or in need of resolution. It demands a response from the person who receives it, in a way that pleasant messages rarely do.

What research tells us

The clearest current evidence on this comes from a 2024 study by Elena Fumagalli and L. J. Shrum, Professor of Marketing at HEC Paris, published in Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology. Their research draws a precise distinction between two types of discomfort that campaigns can trigger

Physical disgust, provoked by images of bodily repulsion or gore, tends to influence consumption-related behaviour and how people perceive themselves. It is a powerful disruptor, but its effects can be unpredictable and, in some cases, counterproductive.

The second type is closer to indignation. It is triggered when something violates our values or our sense of what is right: the discomfort of witnessing an injustice, encountering a contradiction, or having a familiar social norm deliberately inverted. Fumagalli and Shrum found that this form of discomfort can increase generosity and make people significantly more likely to engage in pro-social behaviour, including donating to a cause or helping others.

The mechanism matters. Indignation creates a pressure to restore what feels broken. When communication manages to channel that pressure toward a specific action, discomfort stops being a barrier and becomes a driver.

Four campaigns that put this into practice

The clearest examples come from campaigns that have made discomfort not a stylistic choice but the structural core of their message.

Citi’s “#StareAtGreatness” campaign for the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games inverted a norm most people hold without examining it. We are taught from childhood that staring at someone with a disability is rude. The campaign made Paralympic athletes the ones issuing the invitation: stare, because what you are seeing is excellence. The discomfort of a broken rule is redirected into something closer to admiration.

The Fondation 30 Millions d’Amis campaign “We Are The Champions” (2019) used the structure of a celebration to deliver a different verdict entirely. The film opens like a sporting victory, and closes on the revelation that France leads Europe in pet abandonment, with around 100,000 animals abandoned every year. The familiar joy of a triumphant anthem becomes a mirror of collective shame. The reversal is what makes the message impossible to dismiss.

The Ligue contre le cancer’s “Va Chier” campaign, launched as part of Mars Bleu, took a more direct route. It used deliberately crude language that most health communication would refuse to touch. Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in France, yet it remains heavily stigmatised because screening involves confronting something intimate and socially taboo. The slogan breaks that taboo explicitly, making the conversation impossible to sidestep.

The Women’s Equality Party (UK) campaign “It’s Handy to Have a Dick” used absurdist exaggeration: men depicted with a literal third hand attached to their trousers, giving them extra reach in the workplace and in negotiations. What statistics about gender inequality rarely achieve, this image does in seconds. It makes structural advantage visible, concrete, and faintly ridiculous.

Each of these campaigns works because the discomfort is intentional, proportionate, and directly tied to the cause being served.

When it works and when it does not

Deliberate discomfort is not a formula that can be applied without thought. It requires a coherent relationship between the unease created and the message being carried. When that link is absent, provocative campaigns tend to generate attention without generating action: audiences remember being unsettled, but not why it mattered.

The campaigns that work tend to share a few characteristics. The discomfort reveals something already true but previously hidden, or inverts a norm that was already causing harm. It does not manufacture outrage; it exposes what was already there. And it gives the audience somewhere to direct what they are feeling, whether that is getting screened, donating, looking at someone differently, or reconsidering a long-held assumption.

For organisations working on causes where the stakes are real, this is a question worth sitting with. The instinct to protect audiences from discomfort is understandable, and sometimes right. But it can also be a way of making communication safer to produce than it is to receive. When a cause involves genuine injustice or genuine risk, there may be more honesty in naming that directly than in softening it for easier consumption.