Many Smokers Have Misperceptions About Nicotine. Researchers Are Using Curiosity To Correct These Beliefs

Misperceptions about nicotine abound. Nicotine is not the main cancer-causing component in cigarettes; still, many believe it is. Nicotine makes cigarettes addictive; many people believe it does not.

Researchers from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies (INTS) at Rutgers University want to make sure consumers understand the effects of nicotine in advance of a proposed nicotine-level mandate by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that would cap nicotine levels in cigarettes at 0.7 milligrams per gram of tobacco, significantly lower than the average level of 10 to 12 mg of nicotine in traditional cigarettes.

Manufacturers are offering low-nicotine-content cigarettes, and while they are less addictive than regular tobacco cigarettes, they still aren’t healthy, says Xinyi Wang (Ph.D. ‘25), postdoctoral fellow at the Health Communication and Equity Lab at Annenberg. “Smoking any type of tobacco can cause lung cancer, emphysema, and other diseases, no matter the nicotine content,” she says. “At the same time, very low-nicotine-content cigarettes can help those who smoke to stop smoking, so we want to make sure they know these types of cigarettes are less addictive than regular tobacco cigarettes.”

In a new study published in Scientific Reports, Wang and a research team consisting of Annenberg Associate Professors Andy Tan and David Lydon-Staley, doctoral candidate Benjamin Muzekari, and INTS researcher Melissa Mercincavage tested several ways to educate people about nicotine, focusing on three groups of people who have been targeted by the tobacco industry and tend to hold more false beliefs about nicotine than other populations: Black/African-American adults who smoke, rural adults who smoke, and young adults who smoke.

The team found that educational messages about nicotine that spark a person’s sense of curiosity are better at reducing nicotine false beliefs than typical nicotine educational messages that simply state facts about nicotine.

Sparking Curiosity

Three types of message framing have been regularly shown to elicit curiosity: using questions rather than statements (e.g., “What substance in tobacco cigarettes makes them addictive?”), encouraging active participation rather than just passive exposure to facts (e.g., “On a scale from 1 to 10, how interesting do you find this fact about nicotine?”), and including cues that indicate that others found the facts interesting (e.g., “Over 63% of United States adults were surprised to learn that…”).

“States of curiosity are associated with better learning — people are more likely to remember information they are exposed to when experiencing higher-than-usual levels of curiosity,” Wang says. “In our previous research, we’ve found that curiosity can help those who smoke learn and recall facts about smoking, even when those facts point out that smoking is bad for you.”

For this study, the team first tested which of these three curiosity-eliciting techniques had the greatest likelihood of reducing nicotine false beliefs among these three populations.

They found that certain curiosity-eliciting message components that worked for some populations didn’t work for others. For example, among Black/African American adults who smoke, the use of questions was determined to have the greatest likelihood of success, while among young adults who smoke, questions were unhelpful, and the use of social signals was determined to have the greatest likelihood of success.

“This shows how important it is to customize messages for specific populations,” Wang says.

Next Steps

The research team hopes their findings will lay the groundwork for future studies on how to educate Americans about nicotine and create interventions to help people stop smoking, especially as more low-nicotine-content cigarettes appear on shelves.

“There’s so much still to learn about nicotine messaging,” Wang says. “Our hope is to better understand how long people remember facts about smoking and nicotine, how social and psychological factors contribute to the different effectiveness of nicotine messaging, and how curiosity can be used in widespread health campaigns.”