Table 1.
Percent of Participants Misled in Each Experiment
| Misleadingness Items by Category | Exp. 1 | Exp. 2 | Exp. 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beliefs That Chemical Quantity Substantially Affects Risk | |||
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| If you learned that your cigarettes have a lot more of a dangerous chemical than other cigarettes, how likely, if at all, would you be to switch brands? [I might, I would definitely]a,b | 92% | 92% | 89% |
| If you can’t quit, you should switch to a brand with fewer chemicals.b | 54% | 54% | 56% |
| It’s much safer to smoke cigarettes with fewer chemicals. | 38% | 41% | 42% |
| A cigarette is much safer to smoke if it has less arsenic than other cigarettes. | 29% | 29% | 34% |
| A cigarette is much safer to smoke if it has less crotonaldehyde than other cigarettes. | 18% | 20% | - |
| A cigarette is much safer to smoke if it has less 4-aminobiphenyl than other cigarettes. | 18% | - | - |
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| Beliefs That Brands Vary in Risk | |||
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| Some cigarette brands are much more harmful to smoke than others.b | 46% | 53% | 58% |
| If a website had information like this for all cigarette brands, I would use it to see which cigarettes are safer than others. | 52% | 52% | - |
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| Evidence of Making Comparisons with Incomplete Data | |||
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| My brand of cigarettes is probably safer than Brentfield Gold.a | 9% | 19% | 20% |
| My brand of cigarettes has fewer chemicals than Brentfield Gold.a | 10% | 18% | 23% |
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| Perceptions That Smoking Is Less Dangerous | |||
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| Reading this webpage makes me...[less likely to quit smoking].a | 0% | 1% | 1% |
| After viewing this webpage, I now feel that smoking is... [less dangerous]. | 0% | 1% | - |
| How harmful are Brentfield Gold cigarettes (the cigarettes described in the webpage)? [not at all harmful, a little harmful] | 0% | 1% | 1% |
| It’s safer to smoke Brentfield Gold cigarettes than most other cigarettes. | 2% | 4% | 7% |
| Brentfield Gold cigarettes have fewer chemicals than other cigarettes. | 2% | 6% | 7% |
Note.
For most items, the response scale was a 5-point scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree,” and agreement was coded as being misled. Because there were no differences in percent of participants misled by condition in any of the 3 experiments, percentages given are across all conditions in each experiment. Hyphens indicate items that were not asked in the survey for that experiment.
a
Item only asked of smokers.
b
“brand/styles” in Experiments 2 and 3.