AsianScientist (Aug. 5, 2011) – A new Taiwanese study reveals that smokers who take multivitamins offset their healthy behavior by smoking more cigarettes.
This is an example of what psychologists call the licensing effect, which occurs when people make a virtuous choice that permits them to make a poor choice later on, such as when someone ‘earns’ a weekend binge by avoiding alcohol all week.
In this case, smokers take multivitamins, which they believe to be a healthy choice to reduce the risk of cancer and thus allows them to smoke more. However, no evidence has been proved that multivitamins can protect against cancer.
The study, published online this week in the journal Addiction, describes two experiments showing how licensing effect affects the behavior of smokers.
In the first experiment, run as a dummy health-food test, 74 daily smokers were given a placebo, but half were told they had taken a vitamin C supplement. The smokers then took a one-hour unrelated survey during which they were allowed to smoke. Those who thought they had taken a vitamin pill smoked almost twice as much as those who knew they had taken a placebo and reported greater feelings of invulnerability.
The second experiment was an expanded version of the first, with 80 participants taken from a larger community and half were told that they were taking a multivitamin pill. In addition, during the one-hour survey participants were also asked about their attitudes to multivitamins. The smokers who thought they had taken a multivitamin once again smoked more than the control group.
But this time, researchers found that among the multivitamin group, smokers with more positive attitudes toward multivitamins experienced a higher boost in perceived invulnerability and smoked even more than their less enthusiastic counterparts. In other words, the amount of extra smoking rose if the smoker believed that multivitamins increased health.
Therefore, health-conscious smokers who take vitamins with false belief in their invulnerability to the major health hazards associated with smoking, will smoke more and conversely increase their overall health risk.
“Smokers who take dietary supplements can fool themselves into thinking they are protected against cancer and other diseases,’’ says the first author Wen-Bin Chiou.
“Reminding health conscious smokers that multivitamins don’t prevent cancer may help them control their smoking or even encourage them to stop.”
The article can be found at: Chiou WB et al. (2011) A randomized experiment to examine unintended consequences of dietary supplement use among daily smokers: taking supplements reduces self-regulation of smoking.
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Source: Addiction Journal.
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