Smoking and Health: What Can Social Psychology Contribute?

Abstract

The challenge cigarette smoking poses to preventive medicine is too familiar to require restatement; what is less clear is how prevention is to be achieved. As in many other areas of preventive medicine, success is likely to depend on both legislative and governmental action, on the one hand, and on individual behavior, on the other. Governments have available to them a range of powers by which, for example, the price of cigarettes could be increased and the advertising of tobacco products curtailed or prohibited, yet these powers are typically underused. (To what extent this is due to the political influence of the tobacco industry is not for this paper to examine.) In the absence of governmental action, members of the smoking public might be forgiven for assuming that if smoking were truly as dangerous as people say, the government would do more about it. In view of these circumstances, there is a real danger that research into methods of health education and persuasion may be little more than an expression of tokenism. Cigarette smoking is distinguishable from a number of other problems in preventive medicine in that its dangers are almost entirely self-inflicted. If a factory manager does not maintain his machinery in accordance with industrial health and safety regulations, it is he who is responsible rather than the individual operator who is injured. A family living in a town without proper public sanitation will be at risk from infection even if it personally maintains what elsewhere would be considered scrupulous standards of hygiene. But with cigarette smoking, it would seem, it is the smoker who chooses to smoke; and (with the important exception