Overview
Research on the negative health effects of smoking has been the primary weapon in the arsenal of opponents against the tobacco industry. But despite the well-known health consequences of smoking, millions of people decide to light up each day. The habit is one of addiction for many established smokers. But for new smokers, the psychology of wanting to look cool may in part be fueling its take up.
Does smoking actually make you look cool? Surveys have been done on the subject, but few randomized controlled trials have been done on the subject. Seiter and colleagues (2010) used such an experiment, however, with non-smoking college students. By randomizing identical photographs of models either smoking cigarette or not, they found that non-smoking college students viewed smokers less favorably than nonsmokers in terms of attractiveness, likability, credibility, and other traits.
Experiment
Using a similar experimental design as Seiter and colleagues, we decided to test whether smoking makes one look cool. But how do we define such a subjective concept? Wikipedia defines "cool" as an aesthetic of attitude, behavior, and style. So we asked our participants to rate our model along these three factors.
To conduct the experiment, we recruited 400 people from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants were shown one of two photos (randomly assigned) of a young man either smoking or not smoking while posing nonchalantly.
Participants were told to “Imagine you’re walking down the street and see the person below,” before being shown one of the following photos.
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Participants were then asked “To what extent do you admire this person’s…” “Behavior,” “Attitude,” and “Style” (asked separately), then rated each word on a 1-7 scale (1 = Not at all, 7 = Extremely).
Results
Overall, the person looked significantly less cool when smoking (avg. = 3.65) than when not smoking (avg. = 4.15), a difference of half a point on a 1-7 scale, or 12% (p = 0.005). Thus, we conclude that smoking does not make you look cool. In fact, it appears to have the opposite effect.
Digging deeper, we analyzed the three dimensions of our “cool” variable and found the key driver to be a sharp reduction in admiration for the smoker's behavior (difference = -0.87, p < 0.001). There was also a decrease in style (diff. = -0.45, p = 0.022). No difference was found for attitude (diff. = -0.17, p = 0.378).
Lastly, we wanted to test whether this negative smoking effect differs for smokers vs. non-smokers. Afterall, smokers may have picked up the habit at least in part because they thought it looked cool. So we included two survey questions asking if each participant smoked cigarettes or e-cigarettes (vaping).
No statistically significant interaction effect was found (p = 0.130). However, the results do show that smokers went slightly easier on our main smoker. Whereas non-smokers rated him as 0.73 points less cool when smoking, smokers only rated him 0.20 points lower when smoking.
Conclusion
In summary, if you’re considering taking up smoking for the cool factor, you might want to think again. Despite all of the imagery from Hollywood and marketing from the tobacco industry, everyday people do not view smoking as cool. And if that’s not enough reason to not smoke, there’s also the fact that it may seriously damage your health.
Methods Note
To test for significant differences in likability between our experimental conditions, we used an independent samples t-test. For statistically significant results, the difference between the averages of the two groups would be large, and the corresponding “p-value” would be small (p < 0.05). This indicates that if we were to replicate the study with the same population, we would likely obtain a similar effect. Additionally, we utilized OLS regression analyses with interaction terms to explore potential significant interactions between the main results and participant demographics, such as age, gender, and smoker vs. non-smoker status.
Additional details are available on our methodology page. Data and survey materials are available upon request.