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

Public 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 compared to the control condition.

A double-blind, randomized, controlled trial in which participants completed two smoking lapse tasks, one at baseline and one post-intervention/control.

An experimental psychopharmacology laboratory in the western United States.

A community sample of non-treatment-seeking daily smokers (n = 77) received either a stereotype threat (n = 39) or neutral/control (n = 38) message.

Participants received either a stereotype threat message that stigmatized smoking or a control message.

The 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 (hazard ratio = 0.504, P = 0.010, 95% confidence interval = 0.30, 0.85), after controlling for baseline latency to smoke.

Messages that elicit negative stereotypes of smokers operated as 'smoking-promoting messages' in the context of our controlled laboratory investigation.