I'm not afraid of posters
Anti-smoking propaganda may encourage smoking
Anti-smoking posters placed at points of sale, on the contrary, may encourage smoking if we are talking about at-risk adolescents, American scientists have found.
Recently, much attention has been paid in many countries to the fight against smoking, including in Russia. However, the question of which measures of this struggle are really effective cannot be considered resolved. In a new study by scientists from the United States, it turned out that the placement of posters designed to combat smoking in points of sale, in some cases, can have the opposite effect.
The study involved 441 adolescents aged 11 to 17 years. The experiment was conducted in a specially created laboratory that completely simulates a regular store. As part of the experiment, all teenagers came to such a "store" and bought several agreed goods.
All participants were divided into four groups, each of which had its own conditions. In the first case, posters about the dangers of smoking were placed both in the cash register area and in the department with tobacco products, in the second there were no such posters anywhere, in the third and fourth versions the posters were only in one of these zones. The posters depicted a sick person and placed a large inscription "Attention! Cigarettes cause cancer." This poster was one of nine approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Prior to the experiment, all teenagers filled out special questionnaires designed to assess their risk of becoming addicted to tobacco smoking. About 5% of them reported that they had already smoked, another 20% of the responses were recognized as belonging to the risk group. The teenagers filled out the same questionnaires after the experiment in which they visited the store.
It turned out that in adolescents with an increased risk of tobacco addiction, after viewing the posters, this risk increased even more. The posters acted neutrally on teenagers who had never smoked and showed no interest in it. The location of the posters, as it turned out, did not matter much.
"It is possible that teenagers from the risk group reacted to the posters in a defensive manner, deliberately devaluing the dangers that were mentioned. It is also possible that a bright poster attracted the attention of teenagers to a display case with cigarettes, which already contained advertising materials that, on the contrary, incline to smoking," the study's lead author William Schadel interprets the results.
In the USA, unlike in Russia, the display cases with tobacco products are not just open, but any advertising of cigarette manufacturers on these display cases is also allowed.
Anyway, scientists warn against using such graphic propaganda in places of sale without additional research of its effects.
The article was published in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research.
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