Study: Thank Hollywood for the Drop in Smoking

The work that anti-tobacco organizations have done to lobby Hollywood to show less smoking on screen appears justified, a new study suggests.

The survey, undertaken by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and published online in the journal Tobacco Control Thursday, analyzed the last 50 or so years of prime-time television network dramas and concludes the amount of smoking featured on television tracks with national trends in tobacco use. For every drop in instance that tobacco was used in an average hour of programming, American smoking rates dropped nearly two packs per adult annually, according to the study.

“We found a significant relationship that when there is more smoking on TV, there’s more smoking on the population and when there’s less smoking on TV there’s less in the population,” says Patrick E. Jamieson, the lead author on the study.

Jamieson and his co-author, Dan Romer, director of Annenberg's Adolescent Communication Institute, say that their study shows that TV has played a role in helping to bring down smoking in the United States.

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“Hollywood has cut down on the number of characters smoking and the amount of time they’re shown smoking and we think its definitely helped,” says Romer.

For the study, which is being published in the journal Tobacco Control, the researchers looked at more than 1,800 hours of prime-time network television from 1955 to 2010, studied a sample of episodes from the top 30 dramas (per Nielsen statistics) and tagged the instances characters are shown smoking. It finds tobacco use on screen peaked in 1961, when there were nearly five instances of tobacco use for every hour of programming. By 2010, the rate had dropped to just 0.29 instances per every hour of programming.

When the influence of the increase in price was taken out of the equation, the study found that the average American adult smoked nine packs less per year in 2010 than 1961, connecting it to the decline in tobacco use on television. The study also included controls to take into account news reports highlighting the harmful effects of tobacco products and the ban of TV advertisements for cigarettes in 1971.

While numerous studies have been done on the effect of tobacco use in movies has had on initiating youth smoking, this is the first study of its size to look at TV tobacco use and connect it to adult smoking. The researchers say, in addition to looking at what prompts young people to pick up cigarettes, they are interested in what leads smokers to use tobacco more or less, or quit all together, and sensory cues (i.e. when a smoker sees someone smoking on screen, he or she will feel the desire to light up themselves) may have an effect.

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While the decline in TV smoking may be in part reflective of the decline of tobacco use over all in society, the study’s authors say their research suggests that TV also had a predictive effect, as there is a lag time between changes in smoking shown on TV and tobacco use rates in the general population.

“When the trend looks forward rather than backward, we tend to think it's that TV smoking predicts adult smoking rather than adult smoking predicting TV,” Jamieson says, adding that this finding is observational rather than definitive. “We’re not at full causality.”

The study proposes the decrease in tobacco use in television has had about half as much of an effect on cutting U.S. smoking rates than the increase in price of cigarettes has had.

The Annenberg survey only looked at network television. It is unclear whether similar trends hold for cable television as well as on newer mediums like YouTube and other online video services.

The study could also have important implications regarding global campaigns to cut down smoking, as tobacco use rates remain high worldwide, and TV shows and other on screen media are a major U.S. export to other countries.

“Considering that tobacco is the No. 1 cause of [preventable] mortality and that it is becoming a worldwide epidemic, you do worry about screen-based tobacco use after you read this paper,” Jamieson says.