>What really screws us is that it’s surprisingly hard to change people. We cook up schemes that seem like they should definitely work, then they don’t work, and this doesn’t chasten us or dim our enthusiasm for future schemes.
It's easier than you think, but the techniques that actually work are all the ones in the no-no box that liberals like me know not to touch. Advertisers use them all the time: appeals to emotion, misleading and outright false comparisons, ridicule, etc. I cannot think of a single successful propaganda or advertising campaign that worked specifically because it embraced the whole "marketplace of ideas" debate club ideal.
Speaking of "how to get 7th graders to smoke", anti-smoking and anti-vaping PSAs. They're so awful as advertising that they make smoking and vaping look good, because that is what advertising is designed to do. Make you feel good about the product being talked about. The few commercials that did actually get people to stop smoking back in the day were ones that were profoundly disturbing and had no positive emotional sentiment. Like the one where someone's smoking through a hole in their trachea. If you want to get people to stop smoking, you need to make it look as profoundly unsexy as possible, and that's something advertisers aren't great at doing.
Likewise, for sexual harassment, you don't bombard people with incredibly obvious basic moral principles and legal minutiae. You make sexual harassers look like objects of ridicule. Cringe, as the kids say. My go-to example of how to do this would be Hbomberguy's early video essays[0], like the one where he systematically deconstructs all of Davis Aurini's toughboy affectations[1].
So let's break down the archetypal sex pest. They're not sexually harassing people because they need sex - in most countries you can just pay people for it now. Instead, they're doing it for the same reason my two male guinea pigs hump each other: to assert dominance. I want you to imagine the most domineering asshole you can think of, and then figure out what qualities will make them look pathetic rather than sexy. Again, if you want an example, perhaps check out this old video from The Onion about a sex pest dinosaur: https://www.theonion.com/paleontologists-discover-skeleton-o...
Forget the Social program, forget the Emotional program, I'm talking about the Make Smoking Cringe Again program.
[0] No shade to his later work - it's also amazing, but in a different way.
[1] People say he's still sipping that shot glass to this very day.