Smoking Cigarettes: A Theoretical Analysis

Suppose you are watching television, a commercial comes on and portrays a man with a whole in his throat, with a breathing mechanism keeping him alive and a voice box speaking for him. He says that smoking cigarettes were the cause of his cancer, which then he needed this surgery to stay alive. After watching this graphic commercial, would you be less likely to smoke cigarettes? That’s the argument I am critically evaluating throughout this paper. This concept that I just exposed is referred to as a fear appeal, which can be described as a persuasive message that attempts to scare an individual in order to cause a change of behavior towards the action or idea presented. By critically evaluating five credible sources that come from several
The method of this study was to compare participants’ inherent appraisals of pictures showing individuals doing different actions, such as reading a book or drinking a cup of coffee. One of the pictures had the person with a cigarette and an identical picture without a cigarette. The expectations of the initial attitudes were seen to be positive, although the warning labels were expected to change these positive attitudes by manipulating the participants to think that smokers themselves only see these outcomes as positive. The study was conducted with thirty smokers (21 females) from the University of Treir, Tubingen and Saarland. The average age of the participants was about 21 years old with a standard deviation of 2.13 and had been smoking for an average of 5.5 years (SD=2.46) (Glock, 2015). The pictures used for this study showed 19 situations, each with a cigarette and the identical without a cigarette. By using a computer program in which participants were shown the pictures for only 200 milliseconds, they had to evaluate each picture shown, and press the related key that represents either a positive or negative message. Following these, each participant was asked to read the warning labels thoroughly. After the study was
Although the first hypothesis was not supported by the results, males in both groups reported high levels of severity regarding testicular cancer both, before and after exposure to the fear appeals (Slider,