Attitudinal Spillover from Misleading Natural Cigarette Marketing: An Experiment Examining Current and Former Smokers’ Support for Tobacco Industry Regulation

Abstract

This research examined the influence of natural cigarette advertising on tobacco control policy support, and the potential for misbeliefs arising from exposure to cigarette marketing to affect such support. Ample research indicates that natural cigarettes such as Natural American Spirit (NAS) are widely and erroneously perceived as safer than their traditional counterparts because of their marketed “natural” composition. Yet regulatory action regarding natural cigarette marketing has been limited in scope, and little research has examined whether misleading product advertising affects support for related policy, an important component of the policy process. Here, we administered a large-scale randomized experiment (n = 1128), assigning current and former smokers in the United States to an NAS advertising condition or a control group and assessing their support for tobacco industry regulation. Results show that exposure to NAS advertising reduces support for policies to ban potentially misleading terminology from cigarette advertising, and these effects are stronger for daily smokers. Further, misinformed beliefs about the healthy composition of NAS partially mediate effects on policy support. Yet interestingly, exposure to NAS marketing does not reduce support for policies to establish standards for when certain terms are permissible in cigarette advertising. The results of this analysis indicate potential spillover effects from exposure to NAS advertising in the realm of support for regulatory action pertaining to tobacco industry marketing.

The Emotional Flow Hypothesis in Entertainment-Education Narratives: Theory, Empirical Evidence, and Open Questions

“…Engagement is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon, and in order to capture different aspects of it, we used a battery of preexisting scales often used to assess engagement with EE stories (Murphy, Frank, Moran, & Patnoe-Woodley, 2011), including transportation (Green & Brock, 2000), identification (Cohen, 2001), narrative engagement (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009), perceived realism (Cho, Shen, & Wilson, 2012), and enjoyment. To assess the effects of emotional flow and engagement on persuasion, beliefs about organic cigarettes were measured using items based on realworld misbeliefs about organic tobacco (Gratale, Sangalang, Maloney, & Cappella, 2019). All were measured on a seven-point scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree).…”