How to get 7th graders to smoke

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/how-to-get-7th-graders-to-smoke

by HR01 • 2 years ago

205 252 2 years ago

andy99• 2 years ago

I remember hearing rumors that tobacco companies funded anti-smoking campaigns because they realized it just made smoking look that much cooler. It's certainly easy to imagine a dual purpose ad that will appear positive and affirming to adults but super lame to kids and make them want to do the opposite.

piker• 2 years ago

I believe big tobacco was required to fund those as part of a mass tort settlement.

bagels• 2 years ago

This is the source of those ads: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Ag...

arrowsmith3• 2 years ago

As parodied by South Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqglh7WoBz0

FMecha• 2 years ago

Given that this was required by the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement as pointed out, is it safe to say that the U.S. federal government accidentally mandated tobacco companies to make a brand-new form of youth smoking dogwhistle?

nobleach• 2 years ago

Show them a Quentin Tarantino film? ...or any film for that matter where the main characters seem so "cool, unfazed and untouchable". To a young (mostly male) mind, that's the ultimate goal; to be in charge. For most beginning smokers, it's not about the inhalation of tobacco, but the subversive "screw the rules, those don't apply to me" façade. This might sound obvious but, if we want 7th graders not to glorify smoking, we quit glorifying it in our media. Make the stupid guy in the movie the one that's dumb enough to smoke. Make everyone laugh at him every time he tries to look cool.

matthewaveryusa• 2 years ago

Exactly, these are the kinds of ads we need:

https://www.advocate.com/news/daily-news/2010/02/25/anti-smo...

PhilipRoman• 2 years ago

I was thinking more like this https://www.theonion.com/new-anti-smoking-ads-warn-teens-its...

But that one is not bad either :)

mrob• 2 years ago

This has been tried before. In Waterworld, the bad guys are literally called the "Smokers" and smoking is a big part of their culture. It's so over the top it seems more like a parody of anti-smoking campaigns. I doubt it ever convinced anybody not to smoke, and I think any similar attempt is doomed to fail in the same way. Kids are good at detecting when you're trying to manipulate them, and it doesn't matter if you have good intentions.

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

Most adults claim that they're not influenced by advertising, yet studies show they are. I'm quite confident the same effect would be found in teens.

toxik• 2 years ago

Kids want to do what they see, if they see people smoke, they want to smoke. If mommy and daddy drink coffee in the morning, it doesn't matter that it tastes like ass, a literal 3-year-old will just by sheer force of will drink that bitter nectar just to feel like they belong.

emchammer• 2 years ago

I thought it referred to the smoke from their engines? They were the only ones in that world who used internal combustion engines?

sandworm1014• 2 years ago

Rather than uncool, just kill them. In british historical drama there is an old standard that any character that coughs will soon die. If the butler even sniffles, they are doomed. So make smoking the new coughing. The kids will then associated smoking with death, living in fear every time their favorite characters go anywhere near cigarettes.

Karellen• 2 years ago

In british historical drama there is an old standard that any character that coughs will soon die.

That reminds me of the classic short-film subversion of this trope: The Man Who Has a Cough and it's Just a Cough and He's Fine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtQNULEudss&t=67s

parpfish2• 2 years ago

Media is part of it, but seeing the real life adults in your life smoke influences you a lot. It’s not necessarily about emulating people you admire, it’s about adopting a signifier of adulthood.

nvahalik2• 2 years ago

Requiem for a dream still haunts me.

throwaway924385• 2 years ago

As a non-smoker, I’ve never felt like I needed a cigarette more than when the credits rolled on Requiem. Certainly scared me off of harder drugs, though.

ta2112• 2 years ago

Just when I finally almost forgot about it, this comment rips it back into my poor brain.

jjgreen• 2 years ago

His worst film I thought, almost an Aronofsky pastiche.

Der_Einzige• 2 years ago

Yup, that’s the real anti-drug movie. Stuff like this works. It’s not pleasant though.

jareklupinski2• 2 years ago

Show them a Quentin Tarantino film?

Mia's OD scene in Pulp Fiction definitely scared me away from drugs

even though I wasn't supposed to be old enough to see it >_>

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

Same. That scene stuck with me.

Makes me wonder if over-protecting children from negative feelings backfires. Pulp Fiction was a risk-free and simple way to make vivid the risks of heroin.

gwbas1c3• 2 years ago

The ultimate thing that convinced me not to smoke was watching my uncle die of lung cancer, and being unable to quit the thing that was killing him.

I'm somewhat relieved that tobacco references are considered "adult" now in entertainment. The amount of smoking I saw in movies and TV (and around my uncle) normalized it for me, even though I knew how unhealthy it was.

itronitron• 2 years ago

For my high school cohort the video interview of the person still smoking after having had a laryngectomy really drove home the powerlessness of addiction.

toddmorey• 2 years ago

Trainspotting. Those scenes are burned in my memory forever.

pjc503• 2 years ago

It is remarkable how dramatically smoking was intentionally removed from even period movies, and in some cases edited out of old content.

Perhaps silence works better than negative mention? There's a real problem with anti-war or anti-violence media accidentally making it look cool, similarly with biographies of "troubled star" types detailing their drug uses.

RhysU• 2 years ago

Smoking by most teenagers is easy to solve: Make all cigarettes hot pink with garish other colors in ugly, ugly patterns. Teenagers don't like looking conspicuously ridiculous.

astura• 2 years ago

Vaping already looks conspicuously ridiculous. Nobody ever looked cool vaping.

ics2• 2 years ago

Finally get to use this anecdote...

    Friend: Do you have anything that doesn't taste like middle school girl lip gloss?
    Gas station attendant: *chuckles* No, sorry.
    Friend: Fine, cherry-berry then.

I don't think it works.

the_af• 2 years ago

This might sound obvious but, if we want 7th graders not to glorify smoking, we quit glorifying it in our media

There was quite obviously a concerted effort to remove smoking from movies and shows. It's been going on for more than a decade. It's quite abrupt, go back far enough and everyone smokes, especially the cool guys and gals. Then fast forward and almost nobody smokes, not even the villains. Ads for smoking are gone from my country's TV and cigarette packs by law must display horrifying photos of emaciated cancer patients.

treflop• 2 years ago

For me, the older kids doing cool things were smoking.

A bunch of actors smoking never did anything for me.

makach• 2 years ago

Put them on fire?

Joker_vD• 2 years ago

Or run them over with a forklift!

cheschire• 2 years ago

Staplerfahrer Klaus as an anti-smoking mascot. Never would've had that thought before today. Thanks for that.

sandworm1014• 2 years ago

Question: Do people who vape spend more or less money than people who smoke? I have some vapers that work for me and they talk about vape like wine people debating grapes. They seem willing to pay insane amounts of money for their hourly fix.

So I wonder whether "big tobacco" sees every smokers as potential vaper. Both are nicotine addicts. Perhaps the demonization of smoking will improve sales in the vape business, the alternative "legal" way to sell the drugs.

throwup2382• 2 years ago

Vapers spend a lot less. As a pack-a-day smoker I was spending $7-10 a day on cigarettes. Before I quit altogether, I was spending $20-30 a month on nicotine salts, $20 a month on cartridges, and $100 once a year or two for mods and batteries. Since I was working from home I was vaping constantly, so I didn’t reduce nicotine consumption despite the cost reduction. I could buy a brand new mod every month and it’d still be cheaper.

I’m sure there are whales that spend on vaping like some stoners spend thousands on Mothership glass, but they pale in comparison to the millions of multipack-a-day smokers that are worth thousands a year in profit. I assume that’s why Juul was pushed so hard by cigarette companies, the economics of Juul pods are much closer to cigarettes than the stuff sold in vape shops.

hipadev23• 2 years ago

So nicotine salts are synthetic right? Is there a reason people consume them via oral pouches, does a pill simply not work?

Or is the addiction tied to both the method of consumption and not only the effect (why i drink coffee and not take caffeine pills i guess)

prophesi2• 2 years ago

If they're buying disposable vapes, then it's likely on par with cigarettes in terms of price. That industry has been working hard on getting disposable vapes that last long enough and contain as much nicotine as possible. In my area it's next to impossible to find any disposables that contain less than 50mg (5%) nicotine, which is downright criminal.

If they're going custom then the upfront cost will be a lot more, but e-juice is super cheap. Have to replace the coils every now and then as well unless it's a refillable pod system. You can also choose whether you get freebase vs nicotine salts and how much nicotine the juice contains.

I personally believe disposable vapes are dangerous and can get a newcomer as addicted to nicotine as a pack-a-day smoker in a matter of weeks. And for smokers, it won't give you a pathway to taper off your nicotine intake.

cess113• 2 years ago

"In my area it's next to impossible to find any disposables that contain less than 50mg (5%) nicotine, which is downright criminal."

What do you mean by this? Why would you buy less than 50 mg at a time?

I use snus, and I'd guess it's several mgs per pouch, and I buy something like 200-250 pouches at a time because I'm not a heavy 'snusare' so one roll at roughly 30 bucks lasts more than a month. 50 mg would be, what, like two-three packs of cigarettes?

t-34• 2 years ago

They can spend orders of magnitude less, or about the same depending on how they do it. Mixing your own fluid is stupidly cheap - a weeks spending for a pack-a-day smoker will cover at least a year of vaping like that. If they build their own coils, it's also very cheap - nearly a life's supply of wire can be had for one or two packs. On the other hand, if you buy disposable vapes or cartridges, you can easily spend more than a smoker, if you buy disposable coils and premixed fluid it probably comes about the same or slightly cheaper. If you have a huge collection of vapes and buy all kinds of different attachments and coil heads you are going to be spending a lot of money.

sandworm1014• 2 years ago

So it sounds like the real money is in the hardware rather than the consumable juice?

Workaccount23• 2 years ago

Cigarettes are very expensive and there is no way to really get around it, except esoteric approaches like rolling your own cigs, which doesn't even save that much anyway (especially factoring in time).

Vapes on the other hand can range from expensive to cheap as dirt. When I vaped I was spending probably $10/mo to replace a pack a day habit. I made my own flavorless juice and used a $50 tank/mod system.

amadeuspagel3• 2 years ago

The main reason that it's hard to change people is that they resist manipulation. This is hard to see if you only consider well-meaning attempts to change people, which you might not consider manipulation because that word has a negative connotation.

jawns• 2 years ago

And yet ... look at how much manipulation happens at the political level.

I find myself constantly wondering how people can be so gullible as to buy the drivel they're being fed.

Clent• 2 years ago

This is a different form a manipulation.

No one is trying to change these people's behaviors. They are feeding them what they already want; reinforcing negative behaviors. That has always been very easy.

The relationship to today's political theatre is related to this discussion by comparing it to how easy it was to get everyone to smoke in the 1950's

madaxe_again• 2 years ago

Absolutely this. You cannot get a person to change an opinion, a belief, a tendency, by tackling it head on. It’s almost like we have an autonomous immune response to information which challenges our preconceptions or preferences.

I have found, repeatedly, that the way to get people to change is to make them think it was their idea. So you manipulate them, but in such a fashion that they do not realise they are being manipulated. For instance, I got my kid sister to quit smoking by taking up smoking and encouraging her to smoke more and more until she smelt like an ashtray and had a wallet as light as a feather - and then she decided that this was stupid, and quit. I then claimed to take inspiration from her and followed suit.

Of course, this doesn’t work en masse without essentially going into conspiratorial psyops on the population, but on an individual or small group basis, people can be given a set of precepts and ideas that lead them to an almost inevitable conclusion - and because it was their idea, it’s precious. You can then really cement it by trying to get them to drop the idea, and convince them that the thing that you wanted them to think is wrong.

Contrary creatures, we.

hn_throwaway_992• 2 years ago

The main reason that it's hard to change people is that they resist manipulation.

This seems flat out wrong to me given how extremely difficult it is for most people to change themselves. I guess on some level you could argue that people are "manipulating" themselves, but that seems a bit silly to me given how you are using the word manipulation.

It's hard to change people because humans are actually great at multiple forms of homeostasis. All research I've read has said that people's personalities are basically solidified from early childhood (i.e. age 5-6).

amadeuspagel3• 2 years ago

Not at all. The fact that it's hard to change yourself is itself part of the resistance against manipulation. It's a second layer of defense. Even if someone is able to manipulate your explicit beliefs, they still aren't able to manipulate your behaviour.

cm2012• 2 years ago

No. My background: I've done marketing for 15 years, have read every book on persuasion and have been called an expert.

The reason for this is that the most important element of persuasion is Ethos, or your perceived character. This is much more important than Logos (logical appeal) or Pathos (emotional appeal).

Suits have no credibility to teenagers so they cannot be persuasive. Cool kids have a ton of credibility and thus are very persuasive.

nerdjon• 2 years ago

I firmly believe that the problem in the US regarding how we handle drugs in the US is that it is so focused on Shame. Same with how we do sex ed and many other things.

We shame it so much, that when you have questions or you start thinking about it, you don't have people who you can go to and ask questions without judgement or being preached at.

And then of course once you do try something, it is criminalized so you can't go talk to someone to get help without being worried about going to Jail (depending on where you are).

It also doesn't help that so many of these systems love to talk about how Pot is just as bad as every other drug, which of course it isn't.

I feel like we need more of a focus on compassion instead of just beating us over the head with "Drugs are Bad mkay" so of course we are going to rebel against adults telling us this. Especially when we know we can't have alcohol but they can, so are they telling the truth about drugs?

Same with Smoking. The message gets mixed up when we are being told all these things that we shouldn't do but adults are able to do some of them.

ganzuul• 2 years ago

Shaming must be one of our worst generational traumas. I don't think millennials like me can stop it, but Gen Z already has a slim chance of doing it.

langsoul-com• 2 years ago

Most interesting part is how we view changing ourselves VS others so critically different.

We know how hard it is to change ourselves, yet view others as fuzzy and that it's easy, just enact a few advertisements and a program or two, done.

But at the same time, it's basically impossible to know what will work until it hits the field. Better to just throw a bunch of stuff and then adjust according to the results.

patwolf• 2 years ago

This brought back memories of the D.A.R.E. officer coming to my elementary classroom to give us the "don't do drugs" speech. At the end of the speech with feigning hesitation he'd pull out the drug briefcase to the cheers of the kids, like a band holding out their best song for the encore.

"This here is methamphetamine, aka crystal meth or speed. If you see a man running down the street with the strength of a bear, there's a good chance he's high on this. It's very bad. You don't want to get near this--it'll make your heart explode."

It's a wonder that didn't work.

13of40• 2 years ago

I never attended a DARE class, but in the early 90s the t-shirts were everywhere so my memory of it was people wearing the shirts "ironically".

marcodiego• 2 years ago

In Brazil, in the 90's there was a campaign called "Drogas nem morto" (drugs not even dead). I heard about a guy who used a t-shirt of the campaign to sell drugs.

gwbas1c3• 2 years ago

DARE to resist drugs.

I don't do dares. (joke)

Izkata• 2 years ago

so my memory of it was people wearing the shirts "ironically".

Drugs Are Really Enjoyable/Excellent

buildsjets2• 2 years ago

Still have one, vintage '91 to '93 or so. I wear it to Phish shows.

User23• 2 years ago

It was nice of them to teach kids how to identify real marijuana.

flatline• 2 years ago

I did not get the briefcase in my DARE education. What I did get is a cop telling me that my parents having a glass of wine with dinner or a cigarette after work was just as bad a them using cocaine, and that you could OD and die on weed. All drugs are equally bad.

A few years later when my friends were smoking weed and laughed at my concerns, and I realized I’d been lied to, I pretty much did everything under the sun.

An actual education would have let me make better choices about my recreational drug use as a young person.

vundercind4• 2 years ago

The realization that almost all illegal drugs (heroin, meth, a handful like that that feel too good—probably exceptions) aren’t really in some much worse category than alcohol and nicotine, and that some are surely less-bad, even, was quite a revelation. Must be a shared experience for a lot of the DARE generation.

esaym• 2 years ago

We didn't get the briefcase either. But one officer did bring his K9. Which then tried to bite my classmate during the "come up here and pet it" session.

sandworm1014• 2 years ago

> What I did get is a cop telling me that my parents having a glass of wine with dinner or a cigarette after work was just as bad a them using cocaine

That cop came to my school too. On a bicycle. He also told us that 50% of us would die in any car accident over 50mph. It was really hard to not laugh at him given the number of us who participated in the local streetracing scene. In a room full of students in jackets and ties, he stood there spouting lies in his spandex bike shorts.

delichon2• 2 years ago

In high school around 1976 we got a talk by the swim team coach, telling us the horrors of various drugs, going into his wide personal experience with them and why we shouldn't follow his example. He told us that if we ever had any questions he was there for us, and gave us all his personal phone number.

So me and some buddies got a hold of some peyote and were more than a little afraid of it. We probably would have tossed it but we had a better idea. We called Coach and asked his advice. He gave us detailed preparation instructions. We followed them and got a bit sick, but not altered. Maybe it wasn't even peyote.

I'm not sure that this approach was just more nuanced than "just say no" or closer to "just do it".

cess113• 2 years ago

Did the proposed preparation entail heating? Might have described a process that destroyed most of the mescaline to spare you the experience, which can be quite frightening and/or debilitating.

I've never come across someone that does more preparation than drying, so to me it seems suspicious to suggest anything else. Mescaline is water soluble so one can make infusions, but it takes a fair bit of plant material to get dosed so there isn't much practical use in doing so.

InitialLastName• 2 years ago

We had the county sheriff come to an assembly, show us pictures of a local "drug den" they had busted, bring out a body bag and tell us "it breaks my heart when I pick up a body bag and the weight shifts to one end, because that means there's a kid in it", and conclude with "If you ever touch drugs you'll end up living here until I drag you out in a bag".

YesBox• 2 years ago

I had the briefcase experience (except it was a portable glass display case with every drug under the sun). Looked like a bunch of candy to me as a kid. I think they even had a fake version placed next to the real thing?

One thing they did that has stuck with me though was this plastic bag contraption with some material inside to represent the human lungs. There was a hole at the top which the DARE officer placed a lit cigarette, then began (somehow) pumping air from the hole down into the lung material. I remember watching the material quickly go from white to brown and tarry. By the time the cigarette was out, she looked us all in the eyes and said "this is what smoking does to your lungs"

Log_out_• 2 years ago

The rootcause is the hyper competitiveness od us society. There are only winners and loosees, and loosers do drugs.. So every economic downturn people do what they were told, if success does not happen and self destruct to keep life bearable.

bko• 2 years ago

Do you feel the same way about sex ed? In other words, is exposing children to sexual education actually encouraging them to have premarital or unsafe sex?

blessedwhiskers• 2 years ago

I'd argue DARE is more akin to abstinence only sex ed than an actual sex ed curriculum. Or at least my DARE experience was much closer to a Mr. Mackey "Drugs are bad, m'kay" than a measured instruction of various drugs and the kinds of harms they posed.

jandrese3• 2 years ago

The problem with DARE is that the message was "all drugs will kill you and your family if you so much as look in their direction, call the cops anytime you see anyone who looks even a bit drugged out".

Then some kids try some pot and discover that DARE was full of shit and they disregard the entire message or even rebel against it. Education programs are counterproductive when they are loaded with misinformation.

xboxnolifes2• 2 years ago

DARE is the equivalent of telling kids that if they have sex, they will get an STD and ruin their life forever with a painful, annoying, lifelong illness.

Interpret outcomes from that as you will.

nonameiguess• 2 years ago

This seems to be the overwhelming majority sentiment of the Internet or at least of what gets upvoted, but I think DARE at least worked on me. I wanna say it was probably 2nd grade, which would have been 1987 or 1988, and I don't remember the briefcase, but I do remember a plastic lung. It filled up and blackened with tar after only a few puffs from a cigarette and I remember being so viscerally disgusted and disturbed by that, I resolved to never smoke and I never did, in spite of a lot of peer pressure. I was largely friends with goths and art kids and nearly all of my friends smoked, some as early as 4th grade, but I never did.

rabbits_2002• 2 years ago

The sole take away I got from DARE when I was a kid is “LSD sounds really cool, gotta try that someday”

BeFlatXIII3• 2 years ago

Drugs Are Really Excellent

fatnoah• 2 years ago

I've probably said this in other posts, but the best "don't do drugs" education my child got was living in a city. It's one thing to hear about drugs, it's another to watch your dad call 911 for a man collapsed with a needle still in his arm in a subway headhouse doorway.

t-34• 2 years ago

The reason "anti-drug training", "diversity training", etc., don't work is that lecturing is not conducive to learning for the vast majority of people. Most people need real life experience to internalize that people that seem very different superficially are just the same humans as they are, that addictive drugs can make you poor and sick and waste a lot of time, that getting a criminal record will fuck you over in every way possible, and so on.

Peer pressure works - if all your friends think drugs are really stupid you probably won't ever try them, but you probably will if they all do them. Indoctrination in this fashion works well in isolation but tends to fall apart as people move socially and geographically.

h2odragon• 2 years ago

"Drugs are Bad" except all the ones we advertise on TV and might require school kids to take in order to attend school.

hi-v-rocknroll3• 2 years ago

The War on Drugs was used to target Nixon's perceived opponents: hippies and black people.

Later, Reagan couldn't relate to poor or minorities, so he (and Nancy) doubled-down on "tough on crime" militarization and ineffective PSAs.

fuzzfactor• 2 years ago

You could always have a tobacco company sponsor a prime-time animated TV program intended for the whole family to watch before it was kids' bedtime.

Where the main characters took regular breaks to smoke their Winstons, using those ancient Zippo lighters that basically rubbed two sticks together to light up.

Fred & Barney never looked so relaxed and satisfied any other time.

flobosg• 2 years ago

Another example of interventions with reversed outcomes: “baby simulator” programs increase the rate of teen pregnancy – https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/25/infant-simulators-teen-p...

washadjeffmad2• 2 years ago

In high school, I had to "raise" a bag of flour for a week with a girl that I was dating as part of an assignment. One night on the phone, I asked if she had any fantasies, and she immediately told me about how often she thought about being pregnant and doing everyday things- going to school, cleaning, going shopping, going to the doctor, etc.

It wasn't the type of fantasy I was expecting at the time, but I did eventually figure out the message a year or two after we broke up.

1992spacemovie2• 2 years ago

One night on the phone, I asked if she had any fantasies, and she immediately told me about how often she thought about being pregnant and doing everyday things- going to school, cleaning, going shopping, going to the doctor, etc.

Unfathomably based.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

Us guys can be a bit slow, can't we. :-/

iamthepieman• 2 years ago

If you want someone to stop something you have to offer them a world of opportunities to replace it. Because you don't know exactly what will slot into that gap due to lifestyle, financial, personality and social factors.

If you want someone to DO something you just need to show that it COULD fill a gap in some other part of their life. If it's addictive as well then they don't need to experiment for long before it's a solid part of their life.

Getting someone to stop plays off loss aversion and sunk cost.

aeonik• 2 years ago

It's pretty funny in a sad way to me that this article talks about how little we know about human behavior and struggling to find answers about why the kids had a backfire effect.

I remember these programs, and I remember how they made me and my friends feel. But nobody asked us, lol.

I'd even try to tell people I thought, but instead of listening to us, we were admonished.

The problem is that these programs are full of bull shit, bad information, bad science, and lies designed to scare.

Kids pick up on this quickly, and you now have lost all trust with this cohort, permanently.

It's the exact same reason abstinence only education fails.

Humans want to feel good, that's okay, we also don't want to die or ruin our lives (assuming we aren't living in a hell). Basic facts here.

pjc503• 2 years ago

Indeed. People want "reproducible" campaigns, but that necessitates being entirely one-way. As soon as you start having a real connection with other humans it's non-reproducible.

lrivers• 2 years ago

One way to ruin kids desire to drink is to offer them tastes of what you’re drinking from a relatively young age.

Whatcha drinking daddy?

A beer! Want to try it?

YUCK!!!!

This removes the rebellion portion from drinking to a degree.

xboxnolifes2• 2 years ago

Unless they end up liking it, which I know some that applies to. Though, they did end up fine.

csours• 2 years ago

"I am not a fish" - Seth Godin

As the author of the post says in a reply to a comment:

' This is a common outcome for programs like this: "It doesn't work, but the adults like it!" '

quacked5• 2 years ago

At the core of the problem is that social services that address the physical consequences of smoking (mostly medical professionals and financial counselors) are run by people who believe that everyone ought to be treated similarly and have similar opportunities, regardless of behavior.

Smoking is considered "a problem" to society because intelligent, caring people that notice that smoking injuries and medical conditions cause sorrow, strife, and excess medical waste. They've run huge propaganda campaigns to get us to care about this problem: literally "other people are dying because of this habit so you need to hate this habit."

But the people who smoke usually don't care about the social sorrow & strife caused by smoking, and they don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to provide hospitals or lung cancer screenings. They just smoke because they enjoy it and don't really anticipate or care about the consequences.

So really, what's going on is that well-intentioned meddlers are trying to meddle in the lives of people who don't share the utopian, collaborative values of the meddlers.

The answers that actually solve "the problem"--ban cigarette sales outright, imprison or exile smokers, refuse medical treatment to smokers--are unthinkable to the meddlers, because they genuinely believe in their principles, especially "everyone in society should be taken care of by competent people".

(For the record: I don't smoke, and I don't think anyone should smoke.)

homefree• 2 years ago

“ So really, what's going on is that well-intentioned meddlers are trying to meddle in the lives of people who don't share the utopian, collaborative values of the meddlers. Predictably, this doesn't work.”

It actually did work incredibly well (at least in the US). Smoking went from something the majority of the American population did that was present in almost all private and public spaces to something only a small minority does in a small number of places.

Whether or not you agree with the methods, I think it is necessary to recognize that the methods worked.

quacked5• 2 years ago

Yeah, that's true.

I was thinking more about the "at risk" populations that are very resilient to smoking interventions, which are what the seventh-grade propaganda campaigns that I sat through and are talked about in the article are trying to capture and influence. There are still 20-30M adult smokers in the US, and cigarette sales are pretty stable. Smoking is still considered "a problem" by smoking interventionists, but they're not doing a great job at finally stamping it out, because they need harsher methods than learning campaigns and well-intentioned propaganda.

Edit: I had removed "predictably, this doesn't work" from my original comment before you commented for the exact reason that you commented. To a degree, it does work, on people who typically follow rules, when it's combined with taxes and bans that make it a crime to smoke.

t-34• 2 years ago

There's really no saying whether it actually worked for good or not. Nicotine consumption has gone through several phases of boom and bust in the course of it's history (the book The Soverane Herbe is an interesting if very dated account of some of the history).

pjc503• 2 years ago

imprison or exile smokers, refuse medical treatment to smokers

.. doesn't work in the rest of the war on drugs. But on the other hand, if you care that little about their outcomes that you're willing to do those things, why are you doing them in the first place rather than leaving them alone?

quacked5• 2 years ago

If it doesn't work in the war on drugs, then why is the drug epidemic worse in the US than it is in Asia?

The reason the US is losing the war on drugs is not because harsh measures don't work, it's because the measures in the US are inconsistently applied by incompetent and corrupt leadership and agents.

toast0• 2 years ago

literally "other people are dying because of this habit so you need to hate this habit."

I didn't need a media campaign to hate this habit, although it probably helped when they made Mr. Potato Head give up his pipe, the smell and the residues everywhere were enough.

I guess it was one way to get kids to play outside; I never wanted to be in my grandparents' homes while they were smokers. Didn't matter if they were smoking at the time, it was always gross.

quacked5• 2 years ago

You're in low-risk group, then. I think 95-99% of HN commenters don't even need an emotional response to smoking trained into them; just an explanation of the risks is enough, or an appeal to their manners (some people don't like the smell of smoking.)

I personally like the smell of smoke and get a great nicotine buzz when I do smoke. If it didn't cause health issues I'd smoke all day.

chucksta• 2 years ago

Tell us how you really feel.

They enjoy it and don't really anticipate or care about the consequences.

This is the actual core and it applies to all risky and anti-social behavior. Speeding while driving, sloth, over indulgence, smoking, addictive drugs, ..etc

What's your take on the morbidly obese? Deny food and let their diabetes take hold?

quacked5• 2 years ago

Obesity is different, because eating is a basic need, and the factors in the US behind obesity have more to do with the available food being "poisoned": corn syrup, pressed oil, dyes, and other industrial fillers are added to almost all packaged foods, and social traditions around food preparation are vanishing because they're inconvenient with the modern lifestyle.

If you don't want to be obese, you have to maintain constant self-denial, long-term planning, and a basic scientific understanding of nutrition in the face of your available food supply being hijacked by advertisers and profiteers. For millions of years, the best possible strategy for feeding was "acquire as many calories as possible and make them as tasty as possible", and only in the past 30-40 years has that strategy suddenly started yielding bad results.

I think there is a much stronger need for a huge legal and philosophical intervention into the western food supply than there is into the western nicotine supply.

kazinator• 2 years ago

If you see footnote 1: "In a later paper where the researchers caught up with these same students again, the difference between the Social and Emotional programs had mysteriously disappeared."

It almost seems as if the researchers triggered something resembling the Streisand effect. The Social and Emotional programs were obviously intended to discourage the kids from smoking, but participation in those programs was only serving to keep the kids' attention on smoking, and making some of them curious.

The kids might also have gotten the message that trying smoking is okay, as long as it's not related to peer pressure or feelings, but one's inherent curiosity. Programs designed to produce resilience against peer pressure will not block smoking that is not caused by peer pressure.

ordu• 2 years ago

*> Programs designed to produce resilience against peer pressure...

... also could have a unintended effect. A kid could start to notice a peer pressure and get more clear idea how to follow trends or even predict them and to run ahead of them.

Teenagers are really concerned about what their peers think about them. If you tell them all about peer pressure, they will listen attentively, and develop a strategy how to grow in the eyes of their peers. Very bright could get the idea that you can be the source of peer pressure. Lets start smoking and lets make all others to start smoking too.

I would say, that if you talk with kids about smoking, some of kids get the idea that if they were seen smoking, then they will look more knowledgeable about smoking than you. Or maybe they will see rebellious and independent from boring adults. Especially rebellious if adults talk about dangers of smoking all the time.

People's minds are difficult complex machines, they could react at your stimulus in unexpected ways, and the more ways you can predict the more mind-blowing unpredictable become.

poulpy123• 2 years ago

Requiem for a dream did more against drugs than any campaign

Workaccount23• 2 years ago

The fundamental problem is that drugs are fun and the bad effects are offset by years or even decades.

Also the fact that vast majority of people who do drugs never realize the bad effects from it. They do it in moderation, use them responsibly, and stop without much thought. It's the hockey stick at the edge of the chart where all the destructive narrative comes from.

kenjackson2• 2 years ago

And they are usually addictive. Almost every person I know who smokes says they derive little pleasure they once did, but are addicted to nicotine and can’t stop. And as a non-smoker, it doesn’t look fun, but I trust it was at one point in their life - I guess.

devoutsalsa• 2 years ago

Smoking Is Awesome, by Kurzgesagt - In A Nutshell, touched on how smokers eventually need cigarettes just to feel normal.

https://youtu.be/_rBPwu2uS-w?si=hR0J-eqBBUOjVtvd

Workaccount23• 2 years ago

Right, I was a smoker for many years, the but the actual conversion rate of "drug users" to "drug addicts" is surprisingly low. The overwhelming majority of people who smoke their first cigarette will not die a smoking related death. And cigarettes are probably the most extreme example.

How many people who try cocaine end up being the poster case for DARE? It's virtually no one. The risk analysis for having fun with drugs is totally lopsided. Society is fighting to keep 100% from using drugs in order to protect the 5% who will have their lives ruined.

nkrisc• 2 years ago

You know those signs on the highway that say things like, “Drive safely! Over 20 people have died on this highway so far this year!”? They maybe cause more people to crash and die.

Ah yeah, those signs that completely remove the human tragedy of those who lost their lives driving. Instead you see something like "99 people died on this highway" and for a moment I can't always help but think, "so close to 100!" before remembering these are dead people, not just a number.

What always reminds me to drive more carefully and not be so complacent is reading about some family has been torn apart by some little driving mistake that I could have easily made as well. It's tragic and depressing, but that's what reminds me to think about my own family when I'm driving.

With regards to smoking, what convinced me to never take up smoking was seeing what 50 year old smokers looked like. Yikes. Should some lifelong smokers be fortunate enough to live to 80, taking a look at them will typically put to rest any remaining desire to smoke.

furyofantares• 2 years ago

Lots of great points, although a sexual harassment quiz for adults seems fairly different than a multiweek program for kids.

And the article seems to argue that interventions are unlikely to change people while also accepting that the drug study did change the kids in the wrong way. To me that doesn't indicate that it's necessarily wrong to try to intervene with short-ish programs in schools, it indicates the content of those programs might be really bad.

Maybe that program didn't actually harm kids, beyond wasting their time, and was a statistical outlier. I don't have much opinion that. But I can understand why interventions can backfire if they're inauthentic. When I figure out you've been lying to me, I want to throw everything you said out the window. If you also made me make some videotaped promise saying something YOU want me to believe then you can bet I'm gonna feel betrayed too.

hollywood_court4• 2 years ago

I have a love/hate relationship with smoking. I quit smoking 5+ years ago when my child was born. But I always loved a smoke with a beer. But I also quit drinking.

As a carpenter and electrician, I smoked many cigarettes during my career and they calmed me and allowed me to focus a bit better.

However, I finally realized that few things say "hey look at me I'm am absolute idiot" quite like smoking.

That's actually what I told myself over and over again to shame myself into quitting. I associated smoking with a few trashy individuals that I knew. I told myself that I didn't want to be like those people so I tricked my mind into quitting.

parpfish2• 2 years ago

people start out wanting to smoke for whatever reason, but then the addiction kicks in and you just keep smoking even after that reason has passed.

among adult smokers, i've always wondered what the breakdown was between people that actively like smoking and want it in their lives versus those that are ambivalent but quitting is too much of a hassle?

bongodongobob3• 2 years ago

I'm a smoker and everyone I know who smokes hates it but it's just so fucking hard to quit. It takes active energy for months and months not to do it.

Projectiboga• 2 years ago

I predate DARE. In 1980 we got a cool early 1970s film that was suprisingly neutral and only focused on Cannabis.

kmeisthax• 2 years ago

What really screws us is that it’s surprisingly hard to change people. We cook up schemes that seem like they should definitely work, then they don’t work, and this doesn’t chasten us or dim our enthusiasm for future schemes.

It's easier than you think, but the techniques that actually work are all the ones in the no-no box that liberals like me know not to touch. Advertisers use them all the time: appeals to emotion, misleading and outright false comparisons, ridicule, etc. I cannot think of a single successful propaganda or advertising campaign that worked specifically because it embraced the whole "marketplace of ideas" debate club ideal.

Speaking of "how to get 7th graders to smoke", anti-smoking and anti-vaping PSAs. They're so awful as advertising that they make smoking and vaping look good, because that is what advertising is designed to do. Make you feel good about the product being talked about. The few commercials that did actually get people to stop smoking back in the day were ones that were profoundly disturbing and had no positive emotional sentiment. Like the one where someone's smoking through a hole in their trachea. If you want to get people to stop smoking, you need to make it look as profoundly unsexy as possible, and that's something advertisers aren't great at doing.

Likewise, for sexual harassment, you don't bombard people with incredibly obvious basic moral principles and legal minutiae. You make sexual harassers look like objects of ridicule. Cringe, as the kids say. My go-to example of how to do this would be Hbomberguy's early video essays[0], like the one where he systematically deconstructs all of Davis Aurini's toughboy affectations[1].

So let's break down the archetypal sex pest. They're not sexually harassing people because they need sex - in most countries you can just pay people for it now. Instead, they're doing it for the same reason my two male guinea pigs hump each other: to assert dominance. I want you to imagine the most domineering asshole you can think of, and then figure out what qualities will make them look pathetic rather than sexy. Again, if you want an example, perhaps check out this old video from The Onion about a sex pest dinosaur: https://www.theonion.com/paleontologists-discover-skeleton-o...

Forget the Social program, forget the Emotional program, I'm talking about the Make Smoking Cringe Again program.

[0] No shade to his later work - it's also amazing, but in a different way.

[1] People say he's still sipping that shot glass to this very day.

dctoedt• 2 years ago

In the first day or two of Navy nuclear power school in 1974, all of us junior officers in the new class (93 of us IIRC) were assembled in an auditorium for a don't-do-drugs lecture by a chief petty officer who was a "fleet sailor" — i.e., he'd been around the block a few times, so it was thought that young sailors would pay more attention to him — and had been assigned to get trained as the drug counselor.

The speaker made one especially-memorable comment: "I'm told that shooting heroin feels like an all-over-body sexual climax. I don't know about you, but to me that sounds pretty neat."

(The rest of the lecture was standard stuff about how doing drugs would get us de-nuked and basically end our careers.)

rdtsc3• 2 years ago

You can have a PhD and good intentions. You can have money and buy-in. You can do a bunch of reasonable things to prevent a problem that everyone agrees is bad.

Imagine what they could do if they had a PhD and bad intentions...

But let's say, first they do have good intentions. However, even then, if these people devoted their lives to their cause, they promoted programs, wrote countless powerpoint slides, even books. And now some other research comes out and says "well it looks like that other stuff was actually hurting kids". How many of the PhDs with good intentions, will acknowledge that and effectively throw away their life's work?

Some famous CEOs were mean to their employees and got good results, so I should do that too, which is convenient because I am a jerk.

That's exactly what one of the leadership team did in a company I worked at. They tried to emulate Steve Jobs. And out of brilliance, dedication to perfection, design, hiring the best people, all possible qualities they could have tried to emulated, they emulated being an asshole, hoping the company would become the next Apple at some point.

chias• 2 years ago

"I understand these trainings exist solely for the purposes of ass-covering."

This is not really true.

They exist for shifting liability -- which is similar, but also quite different -- to where it needs to be. They exist so that you don't even have to listen to the "but that's just normal", "but we always do that", "i had no idea that wasn't allowed" excuses when a person gets in trouble. They exist because otherwise when someone does something that everybody including the perpetrator obviously knows was wrong, they can say "how was I supposed to know that was bad?" and suddenly you have to start arguing in a context where your opponent can "win" the argument by feigning being an idiot, which is a surefire way to have a shit day.

Consider this: https://dynomight.net/teaching/

gumby2• 2 years ago

I remember when the cigarette companies used to hire people to stand on street corners and just give them away (little three-cigarette packs) to encourage people to start or switch brands. Teenagers never have money so this was a great way to get them.

I didn't smoke but I used to accept them and then give them to my smoker friends.

swagasaurus-rex• 2 years ago

You’re the one the programs warned us about, giving drugs away for free.

gumby2• 2 years ago

According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, I am merely an provider and the liability rests with the employee who "posted" the cigarettes with me.

stackedinserter• 2 years ago

People subconsciously reject agendas that authorities (parents, school, government, corporations) push into their throats, what a surprising discovery.

kelseyfrog• 2 years ago

We perceive ourselves in full 4000K HD with Dolby Atmos Surround Sound, but when we perceive each other, it’s like we’re watching a VHS tape that someone made by using a Motorola Razr phone c. 2007 to record the screen on the back of an airplane seat.

Does anyone else feel the opposite?

I can much more easily intuit how others feel and synthesize hypotheses on why they behaved the way they did than I can with myself. I have an infinite number of framings and reframings to choose from when it comes to my own behavior that it's difficult to objectively choose. I constantly ask myself how do I know that my own model isn't unconsciously avoiding negative feelings or conversely biased toward being too critical? So much so that I simply give up more than I like to admit.

ksaun• 2 years ago

Well, I have a similar difficulty in analyzing myself. So you are not alone.

But I also struggle hypothesizing others' reasons for behavior. I can readily empathize with others, but often can't transfer from the emotional response to the underlying reasons/logic.

iamleppert• 2 years ago

I have a simple solution to end all world hunger, forever.

Nuclear War.

ladzoppelin• 2 years ago

Like others have said its the lying and exaggeration on both sides that really made this a confusing topic to navigate. I wish there was a way to push a "wait until your brain is developed before anything" message without being pro drug or confusing.

nashashmi• 2 years ago

Here is what prevented me: My D.A.R.E. officer said to us (honestly?) when you take drugs you feel like you are on top of the world. You take it again and you again feel like you are on top of the world. This is called a high. And after that, you feel like just a little bit of trashy feeling from how you used to be. And so you take drugs again and again to keep the trashy feeling away and each time you feel trashier and trashier after the high is gone. Until people who have been drugs for so long have a difficult time ever becoming normal again.

next what prevented me from doing this was that it is illegal. Plain and simple. I am not questioning the law. I am following it.

Lastly, what prevents me is my community faith that has labeled it to be forbidden.

OTOH, caffiene is also bad. My family told me so. And they drank it nevertheless. And I drank a few times, but very few. But I avoided it because children should not be drinking coffee/tea. Until college came. And then I had to. It was a hack. But I kept it disciplined. And then I got married to someone who always drank coffee. And now I am an addict. and my potassium is super high. And everything else in my body is in the gutters because of it. And I can't come off of it. It's a way to stave off depression. And stress. And anxiety. And keeps me in a positive state because I can drink and become a superworker and get all my work done, without addressing some of the more problematic stuff. All I have done is push the crash further down the timeline.

Caffiene should be banned too. And probably ADHD drugs while we are at it.

kayodelycaon• 2 years ago

The vast majority of people don't have the same issues with caffeine as you do.

Also, ADHD medication is regulated. It's an effective treatment for what can be a truly debilitating disorder affecting executive function, memory and emotional control. ADHD is not something that trying harder will fix.

porphyra• 2 years ago

I feel like humans, especially children, are in some respects similar to LLMs or current AI models. With an LLM, if you explicitly tell it not to do something, like keeping a secret hidden, it's notoriously eager to disobey the command and do just that. Similarly, if you tell generative AI like DALL-E to not include something, it will try super hard to include it nonetheless. It's as though once the concept is shown, they can't stop thinking about it.

Maybe an "out of sight, out of mind" thing would do better than explicitly telling people not to do something?

dwhitney• 2 years ago

Contrarian view - the programs are working. Rates of smoking among teens over the past three decades:

Ever used nicotine: 70.1% in 1991 to 17.8% in 2021; Occasional use of nicotine: 27.5% in 1991 to 3.8% in 2021; Frequent use of nicotine: 12.7% to 0.7%; Daily use of nicotine: 9.8% in 1991 to 0.6% in 2021

https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/teen-cigarette-smoking...

I suspect the same can be said for workplace sexual harassment and outlooks on diversity. I agree that the programs are dumb and the trainings are dumb, but they have an effect.

knowaveragejoe• 2 years ago

This isn't contrarian, this is just correct and well understood. What's contrarian is the article suggesting that any attempts to change people's behavior, no matter how well intentioned thought-out, actually result in the opposite of the desired outcome.

syang737• 2 years ago

While the statement "kids are smoking less cigarettes" is correct, not sure if that's proof that the programs are working. Naturally, teens are filling the void of cigarettes with vapes and e-cigs, seeing as 26% of high school students (https://www.singlecare.com/blog/news/vaping-statistics/) have vaped.

Whether the programs are working or not is more of a debate, but don't want this cherry picked stat to go untouched.

defen• 2 years ago

That's cigarette usage, not nicotine usage. Why would a teenager smoke when they can vape or use Zyns?

foobarchu• 2 years ago

I think that can be chalked up to other changes like the wild increases in cigarette prices, the near elimination of advertising, and cigarettes becoming culturally uncool (orthogonal to DAREs attempts). Your link shows that during the heyday of these campaigns usage rates were still rising. They didn't really drop until after the approach was dialed back, and they dropped most appreciably after DARE gave up on anti-drug messages entirely.

The message of the article wasn't that you can't discourage drug use at all, it's that the means may be counterproductive. The means used in DARE were counterproductive.

tech_ken3• 2 years ago

It seems more plausible (to me) that this is the result of the cultural 'quarantine' of smoking and not the efficacy of the "don't smoke" programs in schools per se. The entertainment industry in the US aggressively committed to not showing cigarettes in a cool or positive light, and to me this seems way more likely to have driven these reductions in youth smoking. In the 80s pretty much any person a 13 year old would call 'cool' could be seen smoking somewhere. Now media uses cigarettes to either indicate that a movie is happening in the past or that a character is self-destructive. With the cultural cachet gone, or greatly reduced, I think what you're seeing is mostly 'background' smoking rates: kids smoking specifically for the effects of nicotine, or because it's a taboo-breaking behavior. Not because their parents and every celebrity smoke. This dynamic also explains the rise of e-cigs, IMO. Kids love streamers and influencers, and streamers and influencers vape nic. Now kids vape nic.

pookha• 2 years ago

One of the main motivations that kept me from wanting to get involved with drugs was the T.V show COPS. As a young child I got to watch REALLY high people from the bottom rungs of society (all races and all creeds) get flashlight interrogated on T.V and or chased under mobile homes and crawl spaces by Belgian Malinois dogs out for blood. later in life if I got inebriated I'd think back to those faces on COPS and I'd start to feel shame and a return to sobriety. Being exposed to hard living (in the real world and not "scared straight" via prisoners) might have an effect that this author is breezing over.

hi-v-rocknroll3• 2 years ago

While COPS might have ancillary effects on some, it was largely voyeristic, triumphal poverty porn and propaganda used to justify the repression and brutalization of poor and minorities through selective Prohibition and over-prosecution.

TOGoS• 2 years ago

Only tangentially related to the main topic of the article, but the bit about the gym makes me want to say "that's an ADHD thing!". Which maybe the author already knows that. As if neurotypicals have an uncanny ability to simply skip over all the details of getting things done. Which explains both why they're able to get things done so quickly, and also why their constructions completely fall apart when you poke them with a stick.

Or maybe getting stuck in the fractal of details is not specifically an ADHD thing, but the ADHD meme groups I'm in sure lead me to think it is.

That said, I did manage to go to the gym regularly for a while. After a few times the routine of scoping out the equipment you want to use becomes habitual and the whole process becomes less overwhelming, though the do-it-for-the-rest-of-your-life requirement poses a challenge. For a few months, sure, but forever? I've got an infinite list of projects with infinite loose ends to attend to!

tech_ken3• 2 years ago

It's definitely hard to change people, but I also think to some extent it's extremely easy if you know what you're doing and you're specific about the context. As the author notes: cults are really good at it. Another example is any entertainment performer, or even just a DJ: getting a crowd from one state ("cold") to another state ("hot") is well-understood game.

On the other hand scientists seem to be very bad at it (if the last few decades of quantitative social science research are any indicator). My pet hypothesis is that this is because an experimental environment is actually a very bad way to reason about human behavior. When you're dealing with basic material phenomena (particles, energy, chemical reactions, even biological reactions to a certain extent) the behavior is 'isolatable'. It will happen in a predictable way under controlled conditions, and removing outside influences makes that behavior easier to observe. Human behavior is the exact opposite of 'isolatable' though: so much of what makes us act the way we do is the influence of outside factors. In a general sense I don't even think it really makes sense to imagine a 'single person' or 'isolated behavior', our mind exists in mutual definition with the social world around us. Indeed the successful examples I listed above are successful precisely because they take control of your environment: a secluded meditation area or a sweaty club are critical tools for changing the way someone is.

As a result I think scientists often have a really skewed understanding of what motivates people, because anything they do in a controlled environment basically can never generalize by definition. Want to get kids to stop smoking? Don't treat the kids, treat the media environment they live in. But this isn't something that can be replicated in a generic/engineering/scientific manner; there's no magic recipe it's just common sense and coalition building (getting buy-in from the people who make media). But because these tools don't fit cleanly into an experimental framework they kind of get sidelined. Instead we get endless variations on nudge theory and little cognitive games to try and induce the behavior we want. Shockingly this fails time and time again. Preventing sexual harassment in the workplace simply cannot come from a PowerPoint deck or training, it will only follow from a massive overhaul in the cultural milleu. Look at any successful grassroots political movement: find people who are primed to receive your message; convince them to support you; use their support and evangelism to widen the circle to the next group of slightly less-primed people; repeat until massive; force structural/cultural change through a crush of bodies. Simple as.

edit: hm okay I clicked one link in the OP and it seems this point is not very original https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/its-hard-to-change-peo...

yowlingcat• 2 years ago

I really like your illustrative example and to me it points at the fundamental core problem of the idea of "social science" to me -- it's not that the structured anthropological inquiry is a misguided ambitions, nor that scientific methods are misguided, but that the two are, to some extent, intrinsically at odds with one another because of practical limitations to isolate factors within or to create in a controlled environment a natural social setting.

To your point, the DJ (and I would say many performance artists) has a practice for how to make this occur in a repeatable manner, but the practice is an artistic practice and therein a cultural practice, not a conventional scientific practice. To me, it raises the question of whether for the goals of any kind of "social science" to come to fruition if it must become an artistic practice. I don't have a great answer to this question but you can probably tell in which direction I lean.

tech_ken3• 2 years ago

Damn you said exactly what I wanted to say but way more concisely haha.

To me, it raises the question of whether for the goals of any kind of "social science" to come to fruition if it must become an artistic practice.

“Artistic practice” is absolutely what I think the field is missing, and which many other disciplines with similar concerns (ex. marketing) are way more enthusiastic to incorporate. And thats not just about getting social scientists to start painting or whatever, but more adopting that mindset of an artist trying to perfect their craft. The basic program for the performing artist is to bomb over and over again until you can change people’s behavior “by feel” (or maybe you never develop the knack and change careers). Politicians similarly start out by pressing the flesh and going to endless community meetings until they figure out how to move a crowd. Doing these things isn’t “hard” once you’ve figured out the trick, but it’s a skill that you acquire by extensive practice and apply by intuition/artistic judgment, rather than something that you can figure out solely through sufficiently rigorous analytics. Not to say that this isn’t experimentation, it absolutely is, but it’s not laboratory experimentation, it’s fully integrated within the real world.

tracker1• 2 years ago

I think the absolute best anti-drug program is volunteering for homeless outreach programs. You'll see the level of f'd up that a lot of people will go to and through in order to get and keep taking drugs. It also helps to humanize drug victims and homelessness.

somethoughts• 2 years ago

In all seriousness (although half joking) - these days it seems perhaps the best way to get people not to do something is to make them think that some "Big" corporate monopoly - with an army of lobbyists - want to sucker them into buying their mass produced product for huge $$$ profits.

The movie "Thank You for Smoking" has a great scene between Big Tobacco, Big Alcohol and Big Firearms lobbyist caricatures [1].

[1] Merchants Of Death Thank You For Smoking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss0jLHvMO20

currency• 2 years ago

changing people is so surprisingly hard—no matter how much you focus on the person in front of you, you’ll never appreciate the million tiny influences that made them who they are and that keep them that way. If you really want to make someone different, you might have to change the TV they watch, the music they listen to, the things they learn in school, the friends they hang out with, the role models they look up to, etc.

I'm a white guy who grew up in rural Pennsylvania in the 60s and 70s, so you can imagine what my implicit biases are like pretty reliably. What helps me get away from that is access to social media sites like X, reddit, and tumblr, where I follow people who are as different from me as possible. I have updated my influences. I listen. I pay attention to my internal dialogue and reactions and try to challenge myself.

and if you do all that, congratulations, you’ve started what we call a cult.

Right. It's one thing to open myself to worlds I'm not aware of. It's something completely different to try to control what someone else experiences.

Another way of saying that is—as an atheist, I don't find religions interesting or useful. But I know that I'll never be able to sell atheism to anyone if their religion is a deeply meaningful part of their worldview and identity. Any attempt to do so has to start by destroying that world and that identity, and that kind of violence is anathema to anyone with the smallest bit of empathy. We are made of our influences and this essay covers that well.

It's a great essay that covers so much more than smoking (or drugs). Thanks for the link.

hi-v-rocknroll3• 2 years ago

Damn, this is something Big Tobacco could use today in the global South where they still use cartoon packaging and school donations to increase tobacco use.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/30/health/chain-smoking-children...

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/pmi-who-...

ta_9390• 2 years ago

A big trial of mindfulness training in UK schools maybe made kids a bit more depressed, and two attempts to teach psychotherapy principles to students in Australia both failed.

I have always belived that the widespread of cheap psychological content aimed for average people is a mental-unhealthy plague and would only make them overconfident in judging their own and others mental health, this is why we see overuse of terms like bi-polar, trauma, narcissist etc.. in social media where teenagers are active.

How to get 7th graders to smoke

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