The ironic effects of stigmatizing smoking: Combining stereotype threat theory with behavioral pharmacology.

Abstract

AIMS\nPublic service announcements often create media messages intended to stigmatize negative behaviors to reduce and prevent these behaviors. Drawing on social and cognitive psychology, we hypothesize that stigmatizing messages can create stereotype threat, would be associated with shorter latency to first cigarette in the laboratory as compared to the control condition.\n\n\nDESIGN\nA double-blind, randomized, controlled trial in which participants completed two smoking lapse tasks, one at baseline and one post intervention/control.\n\n\nSETTING\nAn experimental psychopharmacology laboratory in the Western United States.\n\n\nPARTICIPANTS\nA community sample of non-treatment-seeking daily smokers (N=77) received either a stereotype threat (N=39) or neutral/control (N=38) message.\n\n\nINTERVENTION\nParticipants received either a stereotype threat message that stigmatized smoking or a control message.\n\n\nMEASUREMENTS\nThe primary outcome measure was participants ability to delay smoking during the smoking lapse task in the experimental session FINDINGS: The difference in delay time during the experimental session at the point where 50% of each group had smoked was 3 minutes. Cox proportional hazard models revealed that participants in the stereotype threat group were significantly less able to delay initiating smoking compared to the control group (HR = 0.504, p = .010, 95% CI [0.30, 0.85]), after controlling for baseline latency to smoke.\n\n\nCONCLUSIONS\nMessages that elicit negative stereotypes of smokers operated as smoking-promoting messages in the context of our controlled laboratory investigation.