“You Know Nothing about How Alcohol Might Lead to Cancer!” Effects of Threatening and Hedging Languages on Intentions to Reduce and Stop Drinking

ABSTRACT

Alcohol causes cancer, but many alcohol consumers are not aware of this risk. Research is needed to identify effective communication strategies to increase risk perceptions and decrease alcohol consumption. This study examined the effects of threatening and hedging languages in communicating the cancer risk associated with alcohol use. Results from a between-subjects experiment (N = 584) revealed a significant interaction effect: Threatening language combined with lexical hedges led to a higher perceived threat to drinker identity competence, which predicted higher intentions to reduce and stop drinking. Moreover, threatening language increased perceived threat to freedom, predicting greater reactance and lower behavioral intentions. Lastly, hedging increased perceived message tentativeness, predicting lower risk perceptions and behavioral intentions. Implications of our study were discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Social identity threat
• reactance
• hedging
• risk perception
• alcohol

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We initially recruited 602 participants. Two prescreening filters were applied: Participants needed to reside in the United States and have consumed at least one alcoholic drink in the past 30 days. During the data cleaning process, we removed fourteen participants who did not drink any alcoholic beverage in the past 30 days and four more participants who gave incorrect answers to both attention checks.

² To determine whether the randomization was successful, we conducted analyses of variance (ANOVAs) and chi-square tests on number of drinks per week, trait reactance, political ideology (liberal-conservative continuum), age, sex, and race (White = 1, other = 0). None of the results were significant. Therefore, we did not include covariates in the analysis.

Additional information

Funding

The work featured in this article was funded by the Holcomb Awards Committee at Butler University.