Researchers have conducted two clinical trials to study why smokers avoid warnings on cigarette packs, and whether said avoidance was associated with more forgoing or butting out of cigarettes.
The first clinical trial randomly assigned 2,149 adult US smokers to receive either pictorial warnings (intervention) or text-only warnings (control) on their cigarette packs for four weeks in 2014 and 2015. Clinicla trial 2 randomly assigned 719 adult US smokers to receive either messages about toxic chemicals in cigarette smoke (intervention) or messages about not littering cigarette butts (control) for three weeks in 2016 and 2017.
Researchers found that the intervention messages led to greater message avoidance in both trials and concluded that smokers may avoid cigarette pack risk messages because they evoke aversive types of emotion, such as fear, anxiety, disgust, sadness, and guilt.
These studies add to a growing body of evidence that, in the context of cigarette pack messages, avoidance is not a form of defensive processing but instead a sign of deeper processing.