Communicating about cigarette smoke constituents: an experimental comparison of two messaging strategies

Abstract

Federal law now requires FDA to disseminate information on chemicals in cigarette smoke, but it is unclear how best to do so. In a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment, participants received a message about chemicals in cigarette smoke (e.g., “Cigarette smoke has benzene.”) along with an additional randomly assigned messaging strategy: a “found-in” (e.g., “This is found in gasoline.”), a health effect (e.g., “This causes heart disease.”), both, or neither. Participants were U.S. probability phone samples of 5000 adults and 1123 adolescents, and an online convenience sample of 4130 adults. Adding a health effect elicited greater discouragement from wanting to smoke cigarettes (all p < .05) as did adding a found-in (all p < .05). However, including both messaging strategies added little or nothing above including just one. These findings can help the FDA and other agencies develop effective and parsimonious messages about cigarette smoke constituents.

Impact of e-cigarette health warnings on motivation to vape and smoke

“…Our findings suggest that adding harms (eg, 'poisonous if swallowed') to hazards (eg, 'e-liquids contain harmful chemicals') produced no additional benefit, consistent with other studies showing that adding more information may not always increase the impact of risk communication. 58 Another possibility is that people infer harms when reading hazard messages (eg, the hazard 'e-cigarettes can explode' may imply that the harm 'causes burns'), with the result being that adding explicit harm information adds nothing new. However, we did not address what harm information would do on its own (eg, e-cigarette liquid can poison you).…”

Effective Message Elements for Disclosures About Chemicals in Cigarette Smoke

“…Research suggests that two compelling message elements for communicating harm within the context of constituent disclosure messages are (1) toxic products that cigarette smoke constituents are also found in and (2) health effects caused by constituents. 16 Constituent disclosure messages may be strengthened by communicating information about other toxic products that tobacco constituents are also found in (e.g., Cigarette smoke contains arsenic. This is found in termite poison).…”

“…Communicating that these constituents are found in other toxic products is a way to help smokers understand the danger of such constituents and may increase the extent to which such messages discourage smoking. 16 For these reasons, recent tobacco education campaigns have begun using this approach. For example, the FDA's The Real Cost campaign describes formaldehyde, a constituent found in cigarette smoke, as "last seen in: embalming fluid, car wax and shampoo, carpet cleaner, fabric softener, explosives, wood glue…also found in cigarette smoke."…”

Optimizing Tailored Communications for Health Risk Assessment: A Randomized Factorial Experiment of the Effects of Expectancy Priming, Autonomy Support, and Exemplification

“…Participants were recruited from January 2016 to February 2016 through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a website where tasks are crowdsourced to employees, called workers, who receive compensation for completing Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) [ 41 ]. MTurk has been used in a number of different research studies to collect a diversity of information such as health knowledge of ovarian cancer [ 42 ], ways to increase PA [ 43 ], and to measure body image [ 44 ] and the perceived harmfulness of tobacco products [ 45 , 46 ]. It is a useful tool for behavioral researchers because of its low cost, diverse worker population, and speed of data collection [ 41 ].…”