Joe Boyd OUIL501 Smoking Essay

Old Habits Die Hard: Why do people still choose to smoke?

OUIL 501 Context of Practice Joe Boyd Cigarettes were responsible for more than 6 million deaths in 2011 in the European region of the World Health Organisation (Bonas 2014). Despite this death toll there are around 13.7 million adults in the UK who still smoke.

Research has shown that the majority of smokers start the habit in their teens and continue into adulthood when they are unable to break the addiction. The obvious reason for people to continue smoking might seem to be their addiction to nicotine, but there are many other factors that encourage people to start smoking and continue smoking. These include social and cultural influences as well as psychological factors such as identity. The concept of identity provides a useful framework for understanding why people still choose to smoke. Our identity may be viewed as an internal story that we develop about ourselves but it is related to what we actually do. For example adolescents fashion identity through their actions, perhaps by being a smoker or by being a non-smoker, so that ʻEveryone is instantiated as a particular identity through the way they comport themselvesʼ (Plumridge, Fitzgerald & Abel, 2002 page 169). In this essay I will first discuss a brief history of how smoking has been viewed, promoted and dissuaded through the last century.

I will also consider the reasons people choose to take up smoking, continue smoking and how they are most successfully persuaded to stop. The key aim of this discussion is to understand why, despite the obvious risk to their health, people choose to continue the habit. I will argue that it is cultural and social factors above all else that are to blame for smokers keeping up their deadly habit.

Like many other habits, smoking and peopleʼs views towards it have been created by generations of changing attitudes, social norms and unwritten rules within society. These can and have been influenced by factors such as medical knowledge, fashion and politics. When looking for the answer to why people smoke it is therefore important to consider a historical perspective as a starting point for understanding the place of smoking in contemporary culture.

In the UK tobacco smoking became most popular during the 20th century, with smoking being less widespread in 1900 and then peaking in the 1950ʼs.

Midway through the century scientists began to make connections between smoking and health issues. Towards the end of the century peopleʼs awareness of the health risks meant that smoking had drastically reduced and cigarette advertising had almost completely disappeared. How accepted smoking was in society early on in the century depended on who you were. It was generally frowned upon for a woman to smoke in public up until 1929 when Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, used his uncleʼs theories to market cigarettes to women. Bernays, who is considered by many

to be the forefather of public relations, found that people could be convinced to buy things they didnʼt need by appealing to their subconscious desires.

Desires such as freedom, power and sex (Christensen, 2012). During the Easter Day Parade in New York Bernays hired a group of women to simultaneously light up cigarettes. He also tipped off reporters that a group of suffragettes were going to smoke during the parade to show that they were equal to men. He called the cigarettes ʻTorches of Freedomʼ. This caused a sudden increase in women smoking in public as and act of rebellion. This subsequently opened up a whole new market for the tobacco companies.

After this success cigarette companies swiftly took up Bernaysʼs approach and began targeting women through their ad campaigns (Christensen, 2012).

They used incentives such as weight loss to appeal to womenʼs desire to look a certain way and even started producing milder cigarettes specifically aimed at women. Ironically these advertising strategies probably only served to reinforce stereotypes of women and separate them even further from men rather than making them equal. The change in attitudes to smoking that was brought about by the ʻTorches of Freedomʼ is a clear example of how peopleʼs decision to smoke in the past was greatly influenced by how other people around them viewed their decision to smoke. This is something that could still be a huge factor today in smokersʼ choice to take up the habit and their ability to quit. It could be used to encourage smokers to quit by increasing the perception that smoking is viewed as uncool and unsociable, potentially making them feel uncomfortable to be labelled as a smoker.

Advertisers now realised they could harness the publicʼs subconscious desires and use them to make people buy their products. Attitudes towards smoking began to change. People didnʼt just smoke because they enjoyed it or because they were addicted, they bought packets of cigarettes because adverts implied that with the cigarettes came a lifestyle or image that people subconsciously longed for. Adverts picturing the Marlboro Man implied that Marlboro cigarettes increased masculinity and brought with them a flourishing of impressive facial hair. However, in the late 1970ʼs governments began to impose restrictions on tobacco advertising. These included having health warnings on the adverts and also not allowing advertisers to associate smoking with glamorous lifestyles. The days when advertisers could promise a better life with their cigarettes were over. This led to a new wave of cigarette advertisements that used surrealism. Surrealism allowed the advertisers to by pass the new regulations while still appealing to the masses. The use of semiotics and association were used to appeal to the consumerʼs Sex Drive, and also, according to the theory of Sigmund Freud, their Death Drive. The Death Drive according to Freudian Psychoanalytic theory is an instinctual disposition within every human with a drive toward aggression, selfdestruction and death.

This advert for Silk Cut by Saatchi and Saatchi is part of a campaign that is a prime example of how advertisers used metaphors to appeal to both the Sex Drive and the Death Drive.

On the surface the image just appears to be a visualisation of the brand name using the iconic Silk Cut colours. This is probably what many people saw it for.

However, when we start to look at the advert in terms of metaphors we can see that the image could be read in a very different way. ʻIt could be argued that the rippling silk represents the female body, the smooth texture showing the skin and the bulges and curves suggesting the bodiesʼ shape. The white slit in the middle of the cloth could also symbolise a vagina. The advert thus appealed to both sensual and sadistic impulses, the desire to mutilate as well as penetrate the female bodyʼ (Chandler, 2015). According to Freudʼs theory it doesnʼt matter if the viewer doesnʼt consciously make these connections, subconsciously they are making a link between Silk Cut cigarettes and the satisfaction of these two primal subconscious urges.

The manipulation of the unconscious that these adverts employ show us just how influential images can be on us. Just seeing an image can make the brain crave something. Although these adverts are no longer used they suggest that imagery may be another reason for people taking up smoking and finding it hard to stop. Whether in magazines, on TV or in films viewing images of things we associate with smoking, or even something the same colour as a brand of cigarettes, could trigger a craving for either the cigarette itself or for what we are led to believe comes with the cigarette.

While discussing the impact of advertising on smoking it is important to question whether advertising in general really does have that much of an impact on societies behaviour. There is limited evidence that advertisements actually cause that many people to take up smoking in the first place. The overall amount of smokers has been steadily going down in the United Kingdom since the 1950ʼs despite this being around the time when there was the greatest amount of tobacco advertisement. This decrease is thought to be mainly because the populationʼs knowledge of the health risks of smoking was increasing (Bonas, 2014). The proportion of the population who had never smoked rose steadily from 37% in 1974 to 58% in 2013 (ash, 2015). These figures show that even at the times when new regulations restricted or banned

cigarette adverts the number of people being persuaded to start smoking continued to decrease at a steady rate. This suggests that the adverts didnʼt actually have that great affect at all on the number of people taking up smoking. Michael Schudson also urges us to question advertisingʼs presumed ʻmagical potencyʼ: ʻadvertisements are aimed at a target audience who already use the product…it simply tries to interest the consumer in an alternative brandʼ (1993). If this is true then the idea that tobacco companies have been convincing people into taking up smoking is false. It could however, still contribute to people failing to quit.

Smoking seriously harms you and others around you. Everybody is aware of this fact. And yet, reminding people of this doesnʼt seem to be a particularly effective way of convincing people to stop. Maybe this is because people donʼt think it will ever catch up with them, they have their head in the sand and they wonʼt believe smoking will make them ill until they become ill. On the other hand Freud might have been right in thinking we do all have a ʻdeath driveʼ, a subconscious part of our psyche intent on self destruction. Perhaps some people choose to smoke because it feels like they have more control over their life.

It is widely believed, in particular by non-smokers, that the key factor in peopleʼs smoking habit is the physical addiction to nicotine. However studies have found that this is often just one small part of smokersʼ inability to stop (Bonas, 2014). For many, smoking is a habit that is triggered by a number of different social and psychological factors. These triggers could include: seeing other people smoking; stress; going to the pub; or doing anything else that the individual associates with having a cigarette. For example, if they normally smoke on their walk to work in the morning then a smoker will be likely to crave a cigarette when they leave the house in the morning. This shows that peopleʼs choice to smoke is not as black and white as ʻaddicted or not addictedʼ but greatly depends on how smoking fits into their lifestyle.

We learn by example from others. We are strongly influenced by our parents, and other people we may look up to, such as peers, actors and pop stars.

(Bonas, 2014). This suggests that some people are choosing to smoke because they are aiming to create a self-image, one that they see as positive.

This could also be another explanation for why it is hard to stop. It is possible people who smoke to make themselves appear a certain way feel that if they stop they will lose part of their identity (Bonas, 2014).

The majority of smokers take up the habit when they are in their teens.

Influences on them around this time could be their parents, people they see in films and on television and their peers who they may be trying to fit in with. 84 per cent of young people said that they believed that people started smoking because they thought they looked cool in front of their friends; 70 per cent of smokers said that their friends pressured them into it (Bonas 2014). This suggests that the majority of smokers chose to start smoking because of the people they were surrounded by. It is also useful to consider the identity of

young people who choose not to smoke. One project found that non-smoking boys developed identities around sport in order to retain some ʻcoolnessʼ, although it was only a small-scale focus group study of school students in New Zealand (Plumridge, Fitzgerald & Abel, 2002). The company and environment smokers are in could also explain why many of them then continue to smoke.

In 2007 the UK government introduced legislation banning smoking in public buildings. A study into the effect of the legislation on smokers showed that although it has helped smokers cut down or quit, peopleʼs social networks are still the strongest influence on people continuing to smoke. Maintaining ʻquitʼ status appeared to be particularly difficult for smokers embedded in subcultures where smoking was the norm (Hargreaves 2010). The same study also showed that people living or working in an environment where there were no other smokers found it much easier to quit. In this sort of environment there appears to develop a stigma against smoking when it is not considered the social norm. Therefore smokers may quit simply to conform to their social situation out of fear of being seen as different or even perhaps as ʻdirtyʼ.

Another scheme that has proved effective in helping smokers quit has been with financial incentives. A recent study carried out by the University of Cambridge found that women were much more likely to quit smoking during pregnancy if they were offered incentives in the form of shopping vouchers. ʻThe NHS Stop Smoking services help around 6 in every 100 pregnant women to stop smoking…. Compared with 20 in every 100 with financial incentives (The Guardian, 2015). This is an interesting experiment to look at as it suggests that for some people, simply protecting the health of their child is not reason enough to stop smoking and that extra bonuses are needed. However, whether this reflects the behavior of the whole smoking community is obviously debatable. These findings also suggest that financial rewards may be one of the most effective ways to cut down the populationʼs smoking.

However, there are downsides to schemes such as this, the most obvious being the cost. ʻMany people found the idea of paying people to do the right thing unpalatableʼ (Devlin, 2015). On the other hand investing in schemes like this could save money in the long-term, as they are more cost effective than education initiatives when it comes to cutting down numbers of smokers.

For people who have smoked for a long time smoking may have become part of their identity and this could be a key factor in preventing them from quitting.

If they identify themselves as ʻa smokerʼ then taking away this part of their lives may be unsettling. They are likely to have friends and colleagues who also smoke and with whom they socialize mostly when smoking. In the process of quitting, spending time with people who still smoke is likely to make the process harder or cause a relapse (Bonas, 2014). All this points towards the theory that a large factor in people still choosing to smoke is related to the social environment they live in; if people around them smoke then they are more likely to want to smoke and to find it much harder to stop.

However, if the individual find themselves in an environment in which smoking is not accepted as the social norm and there are not many other people that smoke then the desire to smoke will be decreased and the likelihood of quitting successfully is increased.

It seems that social factors play a large part in an individual smoker始s ability to stop smoking. Environments where this pressure is obvious include places of work and of social gathering. After the 2007 UK ban on smoking in public places there was evidence that people did cut down on smoking. This is likely because it is not now so easy to be in a situation where smoking is permitted.

The ban did have a positive effect in lowering the number of smokers and encouraging some continuing smokers to cut down; this suggests that the most effective way to continue reducing these numbers is to focus on smoking in public places. If there are fewer places where it is considered socially acceptable to smoke then it seems likely that people will smoke less and find it easier to quit. A potential next step from banning smoking in public buildings could be to regulate even where smoking is permitted outside. In New York for example, smoking is not permitted within 100 feet from the entrances to public buildings, forcing people to go to designated areas to smoke. Although 100 feet is not a great distance, what this does is begin to remove smoking from the public eye. Non-smokers who are entering the building would no longer be exposed to the sight of smokers and over time it would become a much more uncommon sight. Although it would be a slow transition, this could eventually lead to smoking in public slipping out of the social norm, further restricting smokers始 ability to feel comfortable. Reflecting on the effectiveness of the financial incentive scheme for pregnant women it is also possible to reduce the amount of smokers by rewarding successful quitters. It is hard to tell how this would work on a larger scale but if reward schemes were mixed with restrictions on places people can smoke it might encourage a wider range of people to stop smoking.

Overall, it seems clear that smokers始 physical addiction to nicotine is only a small part of the answer to why people still choose to smoke. Although the explanation may vary greatly from person to person, the factors seem to be down to the person始s development of identity, as a smoker or as a nonsmoker, within their environment. Social and cultural pressures have a huge effect on the individual and their smoking habits, either opposing their will to smoke or encouraging it. This suggests that the most effective way of cutting down smoking is to either moving the smoker to a new environment, which may be unrealistic, or changing the environment by enforcing regulations such as the smoking ban. If smoking becomes less socially acceptable it should begin to fade from our culture.

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