Fifty years after surgeon general’s report: cultural cognition, biased assimilation, and cigarette smoking risk perceptions among college students

Research suggests that cultural worldviews bias how and what people think about various societal risks. But how does this mechanism manifest when people receive balanced information about a highly publicised health issue such as cigarette smoking? Using the cultural cognition worldview scales, we demonstrate that despite the considerable interventions post the 1964 landmark Surgeon General’s Report, young adults in the U.S. still perceive smoking risks in ways that affirm their cultural worldviews along two dimensions: egalitarianism-hierarchism and individualism-communitarianism. Those who subscribe to hierarchical and individualistic worldviews were more dismissive of the risks associated with cigarette smoking and exposure, while egalitarians and communitarians associated smoking with higher risks. We observed an interaction between the two worldview dimensions. Besides, exposed to balanced information – as is often the case in media coverage based on the journalistic norm of balance – about the risks and benefits of smoking, those who are concurrently hierarchical and individualistic in their outlook assimilated information about benefits while discounting the dangers of smoking. Egalitarian communitarians (on the other end of the continuum) discounted the benefits information vis-à-vis the risk information. Thus, culturally-biased cognition of risk perception does not only apply to novel and abstract risks but also highly publicised ones. Communication and public policy implications are discussed.