The negative consequences of cigarettes are placed, by those who smoke, in a distant future that does not need to worry: an effect that makes it stop even harder
Those who deal with smoking from a scientific point of view are repeating it for some time: there is no "safe" smoking threshold. Yet for smokers, the harmful consequences of cigarettes are a distant prospect in time. Compared to non-smokers, they tend to place the negative repercussions of their habit in a more distant future, a distorted perception that will need to be taken into account in the upcoming anti-smoking campaigns.
This is what emerges from a study by the University of Milan-Bicocca and the University of Surrey published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology.
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TO WARM UP THERE IS TIME. The researchers involved 162 volunteers, smokers and non-smokers, and asked them to estimate the time needed to develop 15 conditions in a medium smoker who, at the age of 18, began smoking 10 cigarettes a day.
"The main result concerns the phenomenon we have called" Onset time delaying effect "," Luca Pancani, a social psychologist, explains to Focus.it, who led the study together with his colleague Patrice Rusconi. "In practice, smokers, compared to non-smokers, move later on in about 5 years the onset of serious diseases, such as lung cancer, stroke or heart attack, and less serious, such as bronchitis, halitosis and premature aging of the skin."
THE LINK WITH THE FEAR. The habit of smoking leads to a sort of attenuated perception of rapid cigarette damage. But individual factors also come into play in the tendency to postpone the problem.
"We have discovered that your perception of risk (" How likely you think you will develop illness X in your life ") and fear (" How much you are afraid of developing the disease X ") play a fundamental role in the temporal estimation of onset of the diseases considered, "adds Pancani.
"Regardless of whether you are smoking or not, individuals who feel more fearful and feel more at risk of developing a certain disease give you an estimate of onset closer in time, although this estimate is referred to another person ( the "average smoker" called into question in the experiment). »This applies to less serious diseases: the onset of the most serious ones is generally perceived as more remote in time compared to the time when you start smoking - even from the most "Fools" and hypochondriacs.

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THE ANAGRAPHIC FACTOR. The study involved young smokers (college students), but age may play a role in moderating the effect. "It is plausible that older people have a temporally closer perception of these pathologies - explains Rusconi - above all the more serious ones that are more likely to show up after a certain age. This, like other individual and cultural differences, could modify or even cancel the Onset time delaying effect: further research will be needed to understand the phenomenon. »
GOOD TO KNOW. The discovery of this effect could be exploited to improve the effectiveness of tobacco prevention and cessation campaigns, for example in the eternal dispute over the effectiveness or otherwise of "shock" packages.
"In psychology - the researchers conclude - there is a vast literature on the effects of the appeal to fear in persuasive communication, that is on the use of messages and images that show the harmful effects of a certain behavior. This technique is now also used on cigarette packs that show images and phrases that should encourage smokers to stop smoking. A practical example of application could be to make smokers aware of the timing of the onset of the diseases shown on cigarette packets, in order to reduce the temporal distortion that they could unconsciously put into practice. "