Unintended Consequences: The Effects of Cigarette Graphic Health Warnings on Electronic Cigarette Risk Perceptions and Intentions
研究香烟图形健康警告如何通过恐惧对比效应，使消费者认为电子烟危害较小，从而增加购买和尝试意愿，并探讨了警告一致性作为更优监管设计的伦理意义。
Grounded in ethical theories of manipulation, autonomy, and informed choice, this research examines whether asymmetric health warning schemes distort consumers’ comparative risk judgments across substitutable harmful products. Four experimental studies demonstrate that cigarette graphic health warnings reliably evoke smoking-related fear that, through contrast-based spillover effects, positions e-cigarettes as comparatively less harmful, generates more favorable attitudes, and increases purchase and trial intentions. These effects operate through a serial mediation process in which fear increases motivation to quit smoking, which in turn directs behavioral intentions toward e-cigarettes rather than toward the cessation of nicotine use. Study 4 further reveals that asymmetric warning conditions in which only cigarettes carry graphic warnings maximize psychological reactance by signaling selective regulatory targeting, whereas extending graphic warnings to e-cigarettes attenuates both the contrast-based and reactance-driven spillover effects. The results support warning congruence as an ethically preferable regulatory design that better preserves the conditions for informed comparative judgment, and carry implications for ethically responsible policy design, corporate conduct, and consumer welfare in markets involving harmful but legally available products.