January 15, 2003

"Perceptions of the Health Consequences of Cigarette Smoking"

Jon A. Krosnick

The Ohio State University

Perceptions of the Health Consequences of Cigarette Smoking: Insights Into Risk Perception and a New Avenue for Public Health Education.

3:00-4:30 pm on Wednesday, January 15, 2003
Room 418 CUPPA Hall

During the last 50 years, national surveys suggest that Americans have shifted from being evenly split on whether cigarette smoking is dangerous or not to being nearly unanimous in the belief that smoking is in fact harmful. In fact, according to one prominent analysis, Americans now vastly over-estimate the health risks of smoking. Yet smoking rates in this country have dropped only very slightly, which has led public health professionals to conclude that beliefs about health dangers have little or no impact on smoking initiation or cessation.
This talk will propose a new perspective on public risk perceptions, suggesting that the public does not in fact over-estimate the risks of smoking, that public perceptions of health risks are correctable by providing new sorts of information to people, and that health risk perceptions do indeed regulate smoking cessation among adults and smoking initiation among children and adolescents. Experiments built into a national survey were conducted to test the predictions made by this perspective. All this has interesting implications for theories of social influence, risk perception, and behavioral change.