Impact of Self-Affirmation on Responses to Health Warning Messages: Does Consideration of Future Consequences Matter?

ABSTRACT

Self-affirmation theory has inspired numerous studies that have tried to understand the effects of self-affirmation on defensive processing of threatening health messages and subsequent behavior. Despite the overall positive effects of self-affirmation, psychological processes through which self-affirmation exerts such impact remain unclear. We examined Consideration of Future Consequences (CFC) as a potential moderator of the effects of self-affirmation on responses to graphic cigarette warning warnings, in an attempt to shed light on the psychological processes. We conducted an experimental study in which 925 African American smokers were instructed to self-affirm (or not) prior to viewing graphic cigarette warning labels. We found that smokers with stronger present time orientation (PTO) experienced higher defensive responses as measured by anger, perceived message manipulation, and message derogation, after viewing graphic cigarette warning labels; whereas smokers with stronger future time orientation (FTO) reported less message derogation. PTO interacted with self-affirmation in predicting defensive processing measures, such that self-affirmation reduced message derogation at lower levels of PTO and increased message derogation and perceived message manipulation at higher levels of PTO. Self-affirmation also had a conditional indirect effect on smoking intentions and intention to quit smoking through measures of defensive processing. We discuss implications of our study.

Notes

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2011/06/21/137316580/be-warned-fda-unveils-graphic-cigarette-labels.

2. https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/labeling-and-warning-statements-tobacco-products/cigarette-health-warnings#sample.

3. Some research suggests self-affirming in the relevant (as opposed to irrelevant) domain is actually less effective in reducing defensive reactions (Sivanathan et al., 2008).

4. Nan and Zhao (2012) argued that high trait reactance among smokers would generally render self-affirmation ineffective in debiasing and found evidence supporting this hypothesis.

5. All omnibus PROCESS and MODPROBE models were statistically significant at p < .001.

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number 5R21CA187631-02. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.