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Nobody likes being manipulated
Back when many young people smoked, campaigns warned that cigarettes cause lung cancer and showed what smokers' lungs looked like, and none of it worked. What worked was an ad of older men cackling about all the money they would make from teens smoking. Nobody likes to be manipulated, and when teens realize it is happening, they push back in ways that can be really good for them.
The same pushback may be showing up with social media. In one family of three kids, a college student downloads the app once a week, spends an hour on memes, and deletes it. The oldest keeps it on his phone but uses it sporadically, and his friends are close to mocking people who scroll all day. The youngest, a teenage daughter, is still constantly on her phone, though she sees the difference when the family goes somewhere with poor cell coverage.
That generation is also pulling back from alcohol. At a yearly jiu-jitsu retreat in Costa Rica, where the drinking age is 18, that week might be the only time the two older sons drink all year, the opposite of the culture their father grew up in.
Did the anti-tobacco ads actually reduce smoking?
The American Legacy Foundation launched the national truth campaign in 2000 and built it around exposing the tobacco industry's marketing rather than warning about disease. A 2005 analysis in the American Journal of Public Health by Matthew Farrelly and colleagues credited the campaign with about 22 percent of the decline in youth smoking between 1999 and 2002. The campaign was funded by the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between states and tobacco companies. That settlement obligated the companies to pay billions of dollars to the states over decades.
Why does being told what to do backfire?
Psychologist Jack Brehm described the effect in 1966 and called it psychological reactance. When people feel that a freedom is being taken away, they become motivated to restore it, often by doing the banned thing. Messages that sound controlling can therefore push people the other way. Experiments on health warnings and public service messages have repeated the finding in many forms.
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