Enhancing the Effectiveness of Anti-Smoking Messages via Self-Congruent Appeals

Abstract

A self-congruent effect model was applied to understand adolescents’ responses to antismoking\r\nadvertising that referred to the self or others. Experiment 1 showed that self-referring ads\r\ngenerated more negative smoking attitudes than other-referring ads among adolescents with\r\nindependent self-construals, whereas other-referring ads generated more negative smoking\r\nattitudes than self-referring ads among adolescents with interdependent self-construals. A survey\r\nfurther showed that smokers rated themselves higher on a measure of independent\r\nself-construal than nonsmokers. Experiment 2 then found that self-referring ads are more\r\neffective than other-referring ads for smokers, who have independent self-construals. Findings\r\nsupported the idea that health communication campaign designers can maximize message\r\neffectiveness by developing different messages for different target segments of the\r\npopulation based on their self-construals.