Photo warnings on cigarette packs better at making people quit

Cigarette warning labels which feature photos of real smokers who were harmed by their habit are twice more effective at getting people to quit, a new study has found.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in the US tested images that graphically showed real people who had been harmed by smoking - an appeal that is both factual and emotional.
At least 77 nations around the world use image as a part of their cigarette warning labels.
In 2011, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was poised to roll out a series of pictorial warning labels for use on tobacco products.

In the study, adult smokers viewed several labels from one of three categories: labels that showed a photograph of a real person who had been harmed by smoking, some of which were accompanied by a short text description of the person; the FDA previous image-based warning labels; or the text-only warning labels currently in use in the US.
Participants were then asked to report their initial response to the labels and their intentions to quit smoking.

Five weeks later, the researchers followed up to see if the smokers had made any attempts to quit and how successful they had been.

The researchers found that warning labels containing images consistently outperformed text-only labels.
Among the smokers who viewed the text-only labels, 7.4 per cent of smokers attempted to quit in the subsequent five weeks.
Those who viewed the testimonial photos from real smokers, however, had a quit attempt rate of 15.4 per cent - roughly double - and were four times as likely to have been successful.
There was no additional advantage of supplementing the testimonial photos with a caption - for example, "Terrie: Died from cancer at age 53."
"There is a stickiness to the testimonial photos - the suffering of real people in real contexts - and they increased the likelihood that people would attempt to quit and stay quit," said Joseph N Cappella from University of Pennsylvania.

Cappella suggests that people are more engaged with facts when those facts are imbued with the emotions of real life.
In addition, the study also showed that the testimonial images were equally as effective as the FDA's previous photo-based labels.
"The use of testimonial images, may help to minimise how vulnerable the next iteration of warning labels in the US are to legal challenges based on the factual nature of the messages," said researchers.
The study appears in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research.