A Person-Centered Approach to Moralization—The Case of Vaping

Abstract

Using e-cigarettes for smoking cessation is a controversial topic among health experts. Evidence suggests that vaping might have been moralized among the general public. Despite the detrimental consequences of moralizing health behaviors on social cohesion and health, some argue for using moralization strategically to prevent and combat vaping. We aim to add to the body of literature showing the dangers of moralization in health by proposing a person-centered approach to the moralization of anti-vaping attitudes. Our cross-sectional survey explores the moralization of anti-vaping attitudes and its predictors on a convenience sample of 348 Romanian never-vapers, before the final vote to severely restrict vaping. By fitting a hierarchical regression model on our data, we found support for a unique contribution of negative prototypes (β = 0.13) and opinions of vapers (β = 0.08) in predicting moralization, with significant contributions of piggybacking on moralized self-control, on moralized attitudes toward smoking and on sanctity/degradation, disgust, anger, harm to children, and gender. Together, these variables explained 56% of the variance of the moralization of anti-vaping attitudes. Our findings add to our knowledge of motivated moralization and advise against using moralization in health, suggesting that people may weaponize it to legitimize group dislike.

Using Moralization as a Persuasion Strategy in Public Health Messages: A Cross-Sectional, Experimental Study on Vaping

“…We also found support for attitude moralization in the general population of Romanian never-vapers and never-smokers, in line with previous studies [ 13 , 53 , 54 ]. As such, the participants exposed to the neutral public health message and to health risks trusted our fictitious scientific results significantly more than participants exposed to the same neutral message and to health benefits.…”

“…The message for the control condition was a short text in Latin, a place-holder text usually employed in typesetting at least since the 1960s, without any particular meaning [ 62 ]. We chose not to use a vaping-related neutral message to the control group because we wanted to avoid any type of priming since previous research has indicated that e-cigarette use may have been moralized in the general Romanian population [ 54 ]. All participants were asked to assess, on a scale from 1 to 5, the extent to which they considered that the font type, the colors, and the background were fit for public health messages.…”

“…As a manipulation check, we measured the extent to which their attitudes toward vaping were moralized after the experimental manipulation by adapting the instrument used by Feinberg and collaborators [ 29 ] and by us in a previous study conducted on a Romanian sample of never-vapers [ 54 ]. Since we manipulated the direction of the moralization in two of our groups (i.e., moral versus immoral) and since we wanted to avoid priming our control group with items that might have suggested moralization in either direction, we only used the first three items of the scale: “To what extent is your position on vaping a reflection of your core moral beliefs and convictions?”, “To what extent are your feelings about vaping deeply connected to your beliefs about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’?”, “To what extent do you feel the issue of vaping is a moral issue (an issue where your attitude is based on moral values)?”.…”

“…Skitka and her collaborators [ 63 ] also used items similar to the first two to measure attitude moralization. From the five-item scale employed by Feinberg and collaborators [ 29 ] and by us [ 54 ], we excluded the last two items, added by Feinberg and collaborators [ 29 ] to ensure face validity, because they could only directly assess whether vaping was considered as moral or immoral, which was not applicable for our control group: “When thinking about vaping, to what extent do you ‘just know’ that it is wrong?”; “Overall, how much do you believe vaping is immoral?”. Responses ranged from 1—“Strongly disagree” to 5—“Strongly agree,” with high total scores indicating high attitude moralization (α = 0.926).…”

“…Despite the above, recent studies recommend using moralization as a persuasion strategy in public health campaigns and health interventions to prevent and combat vaping [ 13 , 53 ]. Attitudes toward vaping have already been moralized in several socio-cultural contexts, where the general public regards it as either moral (when it is perceived as saving the lives of smokers) or immoral (when it is perceived as harmful for children and teenagers) (e.g., [ 4 , 13 , 53 , 54 ]). Currently, the long-term efficiency and safety of electronic cigarettes as a harm-reduction tool for quitting smoking is still debatable, with ongoing systematic reviews investigating these aspects (e.g., [ 55 ]).…”