Couple of Methods

There are a couple of methods which policy makers can use to change smokers' attitudes and behaviors about smoking: severity of initiation, public declaration/counter-attitudinal methods, small favors, and hypocrisy.[3] For this specific policy problem I will only be using public declaration/counter-attitudinal and hypocrisy methods. The purpose of these two methods, as their titles suggest, is to make participants (the smokers) publicly announce/denounce an opinion that is contradictory to their beliefs and actions. Policy makers would get a group of smokers to convincingly lecture others at a campaign/panel/etc. on the dangers of smoking using a sheet of facts given by the policy-makers, for example. After convincing a number of people (the actual number TBD), policy-makers would go back to participants and ask how they felt about smoking. The results would most likely be that smokers no longer find smoking as appealing.

A main reason why this method would work is because of its publicity, making it impossible to avoid cognitive dissonance. Therefore, in order to not seem hypocritical they would have to act according to what they said. This could even be tied to Cialdini's principle of 'consistency' which states a person is more likely to go by their word if they are held publicly liable, which is exactly what this is doing to the smoker participants. A question to consider is if it would be ethical. Considering the only thing participants are doing is talking about the dangers of smoking to others there is no reason why this approach would be seen as unethical. Thus, having smokers publicly denounce smoking and convince others to not smoke would trigger their cognitive dissonance and guilt them into quitting smoking in a perfectly legal manner.

If the feasibility of this strategy still seems to be lacking, consider the following campaign ad created by the Thai Health Promotion Foundation. The video shows two Thai children going up to adults who are smoking asking them for a light. The adults, ignorant of the fact that they were being set up, turn to the kids and tell them the reasons why they shouldn't be smoking and the dangers of smoking. After the mini lecture, both Thai children say "then why are you smoking" and hand them a brochure titled "You worry about me. But why not about yourself?". This campaign ad was a complete success with 40% of adults who lectured quit smoking