For a moment, I’d like to step back in time.
It’s the fall of 2003. I’m 18 years old and living in Maple Hall, one of two freshman dormitories on Penn State Altoona’s campus. The building is segregated: Males live in the north wing of the building, females in the south, but we mingle in the lobby and on the benches out front. On this particular day, as I’m approaching the building, I see a girl I recognize from one of my classes. She spots me, too, and says hi. She’s good looking, which I’ve noticed before—and I’m a single, male teenager—so I try and strike up a conversation. We talk about our class and the projects we have coming up. At some point, she reaches into her purse and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. “Want one?” she asks. Normally, I would hesitate, but I’ve already formed a hypothesis: that by accepting the cigarette I will extend our conversation, which I’m not ready to conclude. “Sure,” I say, and she lights one up for me.
I fell in love that day—not with the girl, whose name I’ve long forgotten, but with the skinny stick of tobacco she offered me. I never expected to love cigarettes. My dad smokes, and as a kid I hated it—whenever they gave anti-smoking lectures at school, I feared for his health, and spent the rest of the day wracked by anxiety. I’d puffed on one here and there in high school—usually around a bunch of other guys, often while drinking underage—but had managed to avoid the all-important inhale until that day in front of Maple Hall. The first time I really smoked a cigarette, I saw in an instant why people ignore the Surgeon General’s warnings and spend thousands of dollars a year on this habit that only hurts you and makes your clothes smell bad: Smoking feels damn good.
Was there ever a chance of stopping my smoking habit before it started? As mentioned, I had been exposed to the standard scare-tactics in school, and I thought they had worked. They certainly taught me, in detail, why smoking is bad for your health. But apparently, this was not enough. Once I tried a cigarette and discovered how much I enjoyed it, that all seemed irrelevant. Importantly, once I started buying my own packs and smoking regularly, I found myself initiated into a whole social world of smokers. In front of the dorms, outside of classrooms, on the porch at parties. Cigarettes forged friendships and conversation and a strange sort of solidarity. Some of the most important friendships I made during those years—many of which last to this day—began with a smoke.
Research seems to indicate that all the health-education programs I was exposed to as a kid may have been for naught. Wakefield, et al. (2006) found that exposure to anti-tobacco television ads has no effect on teenagers’ likelihood to smoke. In fact, the results of that study indicated that kids might be marginally more likely to smoke after they have been repeatedly advised not to, at least when those ads are produced by the tobacco industry itself (which, understandably, raises suspicion) (Henriksen, et al., 2006). Some have suggested that, at least one problem with these ads is that they try to be “hip,” and because they fail utterly in this regard, smoking comes out looking like the cool option, when compared to tone-deaf and “dorky” ads (Stoner, 2002). And for college students in particular, the whole point of smoking may be that it is dangerous. As Neyfakh (2013) notes, “when a behavior is appealing precisely because it is transgressive, telling them they shouldn’t do it… would seem to carry the risk of making it that much more alluring.”
Many adult smokers pick up their habit in college. According to Schneider, et al. (2012), if I had only waited a few more years (three more, in fact), I may have been able to avoid addiction. Schneider, et al. note that if an adolescent makes it to 21 without picking up the habit, it’s “extremely unlikely” that they’ll become smokers. This means that, as an 18 year-old, I was still vulnerable. All college students are still vulnerable, if Schneider’s claim is true. And yet, when I began college back in 2003, there was little effort by university administration to prevent students from picking up the habit, even as they devoted significant resources to fighting underage and binge drinking (no doubt serious problems on their own). We could not smoke inside, of course, but the rest of the sprawling, wooded campus was ours to light up in.
This dynamic has changed. Administrations and student groups have become more serious about stopping smoking on campus in the intervening years. The college I work for just instituted an on-campus smoking ban last month, which has driven myself and all the other smokers across the street. There is already evidence to suggest that these initiatives are useful, not only in preserving the air quality on campus, but also in preventing students from becoming smokers. Students often begin smoking because it is a “normative” behavior on campus (it’s viewed as normal, and it helps them fit it and make friends, as it did for me), and by banning tobacco use on campus, universities can break up this dynamic; they can “de-normalize” the behavior by “marginalizing smoking (as a behavior) and smokers (as people), socially and spatially” (Procter-Scherdtel & Collins, 2012-2013). As bans become more draconian—often incrementally, to lessen the blow—smoking also becomes an increasingly unpopular pastime, which makes it even easier to extend the bans (Procter-Scherdtel & Collins, 2012-2013).
There are other interventions being staged that target college and high school-aged students. One method is to use “peer educators” to persuade adolescents from smoking. Anti-tobacco messages are much more well-received from a student’s friends than they are from teachers, parents, or other adults, and this method has shown some success at reducing the incidence of students picking up smoking (Campbell, et al., 2008). These programs have actually been shown to have an unintentional cognitive-dissonance element: Although peer-educators do have some effect on their friends, the educators themselves show the greatest resistance to smoking in the future—once they’ve tried to convince their buddies not to smoke, peer educators cannot allow themselves to become hypocrites by lighting up (Campbell, et al., 2008).
Research has also indicated that college students overestimate the proportion of smokers in the general student population—a “normative misperception”—and that the more a student believes that many of their peers are smoking, the more likely they are to do it themselves (Pischke, et al, 2015). Campaigns designed to correct this misperception can go a long way to reducing smoking. Some have also noted that, when college students are presented with data indicating that most smokers are comparatively uneducated and low-income , they may start to believe that smoking is for—let’s be blunt—dumb and poor people, and few college students want to think of themselves as, or lump themselves in with, the dumb and poor (Procter-Scherdtel & Collins, 2012-2013).
Unfortunately for me, I was born a little too early, and began college before these programs began to be implemented en masse. In 2003, as a freshman on campus, smoking still was normative and came associated with a measure of cool. It still was a great way to make friends, and even the non-smokers didn’t seem to mind—there were no dirty looks or campaigns to move us off-campus back then—but I may have been better off if they had. The power of social psychology had yet to be wielded against this problem–but these days, a kid like I was may stand a fighting chance.
Campbell, R., Starkey, F., Holliday, J., Audrey, S., Bloor, M., Parry-Langdon, N., . . . Moore, L. (2008). An informal school-based peer-led intervention for smoking prevention in adolescence (ASSIST): A cluster randomised trial. The Lancet, 371(9624), 1595-602. Retrieved from http://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/docview/198999085?accountid=13158
Henriksen, L., Dauphinee, A. L., Wang, Y., & Fortmann, S. P. (2006). Industry sponsored anti-smoking ads and adolescent reactance: Test of a boomerang effect. Tobacco Control, 15(1), 13-18. doi:10.1136/tc.2003.006361
Pischke, C. R., Helmer, S. M., McAlaney, J., Bewick, B. M., Vriesacker, B., Van Hal, G., . . . Zeeb, H. (2015). Normative misperceptions of tobacco use among university students in seven european countries: Baseline findings of the ‘social norms intervention for the prevention of polydrug usE’ study. Addictive Behaviors, 51, 158-164. doi:10.1016/j.addbeh.2015.07.012
Procter-Scherdtel, A., & Collins, D. (2013;2012;). Social norms and smoking bans on campus: Interactions in the canadian university context. Health Education Research, 28(1), 101. doi:10.1093/her/cys075
Stoner, Karen. (2002). A burning question ; smoking-prevention ads try to be hip, but do they work? Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from: http://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/docview/419690601?accountid=13158
Wakefield, M., Terry-McElrath, Y., Emery, S., Saffer, H., Chaloupka, F. J., Szczypka, G., . . . Johnston, L. D. (2006). Effect of televised, tobacco company-funded smoking prevention advertising on youth smoking-related beliefs, intentions, and behavior. American Journal of Public Health, 96(12), 2154-2160. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2005.083352
Great post! Any effort to curb youth smoking has to contend with the very real risk of triggering reactance, as you describe. A tone-deaf, “Hey, kids, if you want to be neat-o like other hep cats, say no to cigarettes” approach is likely to reinforce the transgressively glamorous appeal of smoking rather than diminishing it.
A recent article in the New York Times discussed a study which tried to leverage teen rebellion/resistance to authority in order to reduce consumption of junk food (Ripley, 2016). More research is needed to determine the longterm effectiveness of inoculating teens against slick junk food marketing campaigns, but initial results show that when young people are informed of the “cynical practices [used] by some food companies, such as reformulating food to make it more addictive and labeling unhealthy products to make them appear healthy,” they are more likely to reject unhealthy foods when they are later offered alongside healthier options (Ripley, 2016).
Source:
Ripley, A. (2016, September 14). Can teenage defiance be manipulated for good? The Upshot. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/upshot/can-teenage-defiance-be-manipulated-for-good.html?_r=0
I really enjoyed your blog. When I look back on my life, I try not to regret much (learning experiences, so many learning experiences), but one of the few things I do regret is that very first cigarette. I am just like you in that I remember the first one and I, too, fell in love instantly. Do you remember the anti-smoking campaign, truth (www.thetruth.com)? It’s still active now, but it was hitting the airwaves at an intense rate around 2004 and 2005 if I remember correctly. In my opinion, they made poor use of Applied Social Psychology. I felt as if they were extremely condescending and were trying to shove the dangers of tobacco down everyone’s throats. I remember seeing their advertisements and wanting nothing more than to go outside and smoke. Looking back at it, I can now recognize that is was a great example of cognitive dissonance. They started throwing facts about smoking at me, and I internally justified my habit to the point of wanting to throw it right back in their smoke free faces!