How marijuana use status affects responses to anti-marijuana messages

Abstract

Background: Given the proliferation of marijuana legalization across the United States, there is a growing importance to convey the risks of marijuana use to the public. The current study examined how marijuana use status impacts cognitive and emotional reactions to public health campaigns about marijuana, and the degree to which these reactions influence message likeability and attitudes about marijuana-related harms.

Methods: Six real world anti-marijuana messages were tested on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Participants (N=258) saw two messages from three message themes (cognitive ability, driving, and health harms) and were asked questions related to their cognitive and emotional reactions to each message as well as message likeability and harm perceptions of marijuana.

Results: For all message three themes, informativeness ratings and perceived pleasantness of the message mediated the effect of marijuana user status on the outcomes of perceived harmfulness and message likeability. Specifically, compared to non-users, marijuana users perceived all messages as less likeable and reported lower harmfulness of marijuana, partly because they perceived the messages to be less informative and emotionally evocative than non-users.

Conclusions: Findings suggest that marijuana prevention campaigns that take into account differences in emotional and cognitive reactions by marijuana users and non-users, rather than use a “one size fits all” approach, could maximally impact likeability and harm perceptions of these messages.