The Perceived Relationship Between Smoking, Obesity and Cause of Death

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Abstract
Three hundred members of the general public participated in a study of people's intuitive conceptions of the effects of smoking and obesity. Smoking was generally associated with increased risk of lung cancer, heart disease and pneumonia. Non-smokers placed more emphasis upon lung cancer relative to heart disease than smokers did, and saw smokers as being more at risk from lung cancer than the smokers saw themselves. Obesity was only associated with increased risk of heart disease. It is recommended that health educators stress the wide variety of risks to which smokers expose themselves and inform the public about the other circulatory diseases associated with obesity. Social psychological studies of health behaviours have typically been concerned with people's attitudes, attributions of causality and decisions about health issues. In contrast, this paper explores people's schemata surrounding smoking, obesity and various causes of death. A schema refers to a cognitive knowledge structure comprised of the attributes which an individual associates with a particular object or domain. Moreover schemata influence the way novel information is processed. Given the extensive health education relating smoking to lung cancer and obesity to heart disease, it seems likely that most people have a schematic conception of these relationships. It is also possible that more general “effects of smoking” and “effects of obesity” schemata exist which include other diseases. To investigate this possibility, subjects were presented with a hypothetical person who had died of either lung cancer, in a road accident, heart disease, pneumonia, multiple sclerosis or drowning. It was hypothesised that when subjects perceived the cause of death as being unambiguously related to smoking or obesity (i.e. had a schema relating the cause of death to smoking or obesity) they would quote higher likelihoods of the target person having been a smoker or obese. In contrast, when the cause of death was ambiguously related to smoking or obesity, it was expected that subjects' ratings of the target person having been a smoker or obese would be significantly lower.

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