Effect of Warnings in Advertising on Adolescents' Perceptions of Risk for Alcohol Consumption

Abstract

The present study examined the effect of warning labels in alcohol advertising on the perception of risk for alcohol consumption. Under incidental conditions, subjects from two age groups, young (M = 13.6 years) and older (M = 23.3 years), examined a collection of magazine ads. Three of the ads in the booklet were for alcoholic beverages and these were either accompanied by a warning or the warning was absent. When present, the warnings were manipulated by the orthogonal combination of text voice (2nd vs. 3rd person) and pictorial (presence vs. absence) in a between-subjects design. A fifth condition served as the no-warning control. After examining the magazine ads, subjects answered a questionnaire which assessed several dimensions related to the ads: number and type of ads, attractiveness of the ads, and number and type of warnings in the ads. Examination of the questions dealing with the risk of alcohol consumption indicated that adolescents rated their own risk lower than the risk to adolescents in general, but that this bias in risk ratings was not evident when warnings were present. There were also several other age and gender effects. While no individual warning manipulation was found to be consistently superior to another, the results suggest that warnings can be effective in producing proper estimations of risk in different age populations.

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