Waking the Unconscious Smoker

When 19-year-old Lauren Bacall made her debut in the 1944 film To Have and Have Not, she and leading man Humphrey Bogart became the iconic romantic couple of the era, both on-screen and off. And in what is now a classic celluloid pick-up scene, the world-weary boat captain Steve Morgan lights a cigarette for the sultry American pickpocket “Slim” Browning, forever linking the image of wafting smoke with sexuality and adventure in the minds of thousands of young Americans.

Bogart died of throat cancer thirteen years later at the age of 57, but the romance between Hollywood and tobacco has endured over the years. Indeed, the frequency of on-screen smoking has increased in recent years, with modern leading men like Johnny Depp and Bruce Willis carrying on the Bogart tradition. What’s different in 2007 is society’s awareness of what a public health scourge smoking is, and there has been growing pressure on filmmakers and the trade to be more socially responsible about romanticizing the deadly habit for young people. So far without results: Smoking is still commonly depicted even in PG and PG-13 movies, and the Motion Picture Association of American has nixed R-rating cigarettes.

Given the industry’s resistance to change, scientists have been working to prove that on-screen smoking is itself an unhealthy habit—that it weakens anti-smoking zeal, creates positive emotional associations with cigarettes, and ultimately converts non-smokers to smokers. An estimated 4,000 teenagers take up smoking every day, and 1,500 join the ranks of daily smokers. Might Hollywood play some part in this problem?

What people say about the influence of movies on their behavior is notoriously unreliable, because everyone knows it’s not cool to be manipulated. This is especially true with regard to smoking because of the widespread social disapproval of cigarettes these days. So University of Waterloo psychologist Sonya Dal Cin and her colleagues decided to explore what’s going on unconsciously in young moviegoers when they watch a leading man smoke. They had a group of young men, average age 19, watch one of two film clips from the movie Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis. Half of the viewers saw a clip in which terrorist-hunting hero John McClane is smoking; the others also watched a clip of McClane efficiently dispatching terrorists, but sans cigarettes. About half the young men were smokers; the rest had never taken a puff in their lives.

Then the psychologists gave the volunteers a slew of tests. They asked them about their attitudes and beliefs about smoking and smokers, and about the likelihood that they themselves would smoke. They also gave them an interesting new test designed to measure their “transportability”: Some people get sucked more easily and thoroughly into a story, and the theory is that these people identify more intensely with fictional characters. Dal Cin thought this personality trait might be relevant to the movie’s influence on a viewer’s attitudes and behavior. Finally, they gave them a test to tap into their implicit—or unconscious—associations between smoking and their sense of self.

It’s important to know a little about this last test. This is a reaction time test, in which participants very rapidly view and react to a series of images. In this study, some of the images depicted smoking paraphernalia, and some not. Participants have to instantaneously decide if an image is relevant to their life or not by pushing a button. The idea is to eliminate as much conscious deliberation as possible, and thus tap into more automatic cognitive processing. It’s a highly regarded laboratory tool for studying subtle influences, because even when our conscious mind is saying smoking is bad, there may be compelling thoughts about smoking churning deeper in the neurons.

And the results say just this. As reported in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science, the more that viewers identified with a smoking Bruce Willis, the stronger their unconscious associations between smoking and self-concept. Strikingly, this was equally true for smokers and for those who had never inhaled in their life. Remember that these volunteers were 19 years old; they weren’t “impressionable adolescents.” Yet even these young adults, who had gotten this far without even getting close to taking up the habit, were now “thinking” about themselves as smokers, based on a relatively brief exposure to a heroic depiction of smoking.

The psychologists theorize that the mere perception of smoking may stimulate the “impulsive brain,” activating “scripts” like “myself as smoker” that would otherwise lie dormant. This obviously does not mean that health-conscious people are going to run out and buy a pack of Marlboros just because they see Johnny Depp light up, but it could weaken their resolve to support anti-smoking laws and similar public health initiatives. And it could keep smokers who are already hooked from quitting by keeping those unconscious scripts running.

This study also says a lot about the power of story in general. Bruce Willis has apparently come to recognize this. In this summer's fourth installment in the Die Hard series, Willis is as world-weary as Bogart ever was. But at Willis’s insistence, his terrorist-obsessed anti-hero does not smoke.

For more insights into the quirks of human behavior, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

The Two Faces of Pride

Pride has perplexed philosophers and theologians for centuries, and it is an especially paradoxical emotion in American culture. We applaud rugged individualism, self-reliance and personal excellence, and indeed encourage these traits with gold stars and blue ribbons and statues. But don’t you dare let it go to your head. Too much pride can easily tip the balance toward vanity and haughtiness and self-love.

Scientists have also been perplexed by this complex emotion, because it’s so unlike primary emotions like fear and disgust. Those emotions clearly had survival value for early humans, alerting us to predators and poisons as we explored the savannahs, so it’s easy to see why such feelings endure in the human psyche. But pride? Is it as universal as joy or anger? And if so, what’s the point of this double-edged emotion?

Psychologists Jessica Tracy and Richard Robins have been exploring the origins and purpose of pride, both in the laboratory and in the field. Everyone knows disgust and happiness when they see it, almost instantaneously, and the scientists wanted to see if the same were true for pride. They ran a series of experiments using photographs of models with varying facial expressions and body language, asking subjects to identify the nonverbal signs of pride. And they did indeed find a prototypical prideful look: It includes a small smile (but not a grin), a slight head tilt, and puffed up chest and posture. The arms are either akimbo or (in an extremely proud moment) held overhead. Children as young as four recognized this face of pride, as did people in different cultures, including members of an isolated, preliterate tribe in Burkina Faso, West Africa.

So pride appears to be universal, and people consistently distinguished pride from other positive emotions, like excitement and joy. But that still leaves the question: What is it? What’s its purpose? To explore this, Tracy and Robins first asked people to come up with words that they associated with pride, and interestingly they found two distinct clusters of word associations. On the one hand, people link pride to such achievement-oriented ideas as accomplishment and confidence. These are positive traits on balance. On the other hand, people also connect pride to self-aggrandizement, arrogance and conceit—not appealing traits at all. The psychologists experimented with this idea in several different ways and, as described in the June issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, all of the evidence supports the idea that pride comes with two very different faces. They call these two faces “authentic” pride and “hubristic” pride.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. When they studied people with tendencies toward one or the other form of pride, they found that they had very different personalities. People exhibiting authentic pride were more likely to score high on extraversion, agreeableness, genuine self-esteem and conscientiousness—all adaptive, appealing traits. But those exhibiting hubristic pride were narcissistic and prone to shame. Further, they found that people who felt positive, achievement-oriented feelings of pride viewed hard work as the key to success in life, whereas hubristic people tended to view success as predetermined, the luck of the draw. Guess which group was more engaged in life?

Most human emotions evolved for one of two reasons. Some, like fear and disgust, were necessary to everyday survival, and ultimately reproductive success. But more complex, self-conscious emotions like pride were probably more important in reaching certain social goals, like status and group acceptance. In this sense, Tracy and Robins argue, pride is closely linked to self-esteem. Primitive precursors of pride probably motivated our ancestors to act in altruistic and communitarian ways, for the good of the tribe, and the physical display of pride both reinforced such behavior and signaled to the group that this person was worthy of respect. So individual pride, at least the good kind, contributed in important ways to the survival of the community.

But what about pride’s dark side? It’s not clear, but Tracy and Robins speculate that hubris might have been a social “short cut,” a way of tricking others into paying respect when it wasn’t warranted. Those

who couldn’t earn respect the old-fashioned way figured out how to look and act accomplished in order to gain status. Social cheaters puffed themselves up because deep down they didn't have what it took to succeed in their world. Whatever respect they got would have been fleeting, of course, as it is today.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.