Jolls on image-based warnings on cigarette packs

type="html">Christine Jolls, Product Warnings, Debiasing, and FreeSpeech: The Case of Tobacco Regulation, 169 Journal of Institutional andTheoretical Economics 53-78 (2013)

Abstract:

The Family Smoking Prevention andTobacco Control Act of 2009 requires the display of graphic health warnings oncigarette advertising and packaging in the United States. Debates over thepermissibility of these new mandated health warnings under the unusually broadFree Speech Clause of the United States Constitution have paid insufficientattention to empirical evidence --- to be presented in this article --- of thewarnings’ salutary effects in reducing consumers’factual mis-perceptions aboutsmoking risks. Although such empirical evidence does not, by itself, settle theFirst Amendment debate, this evidence warrants more attention in that debatethan it has received to date.

Her primary conclusions:

First, the empirical evidencesuggests that the FSPTCA’s mandated health warnings enjoy at least someefficacy in reducing consumers’ factual misperceptions of smoking risks.Second, the factual accuracy of risk perceptions is not automatically or easilyincreased by even gripping, highly salient warnings – providing some suggestionthat the danger of overcorrection of consumers’ factual misperceptions in thisdomain is relatively small.

…To the extent that this line ofreasoning [in the cases striking down image warnings] condemns graphic imagesas distinctly ill-suited, by comparison with text statements, to increasing thefactual accuracy of consumers’ risk perceptions, the argument is not easy tosquare with a sensible understanding of factual misperceptions and theiramelioration through mandated disclosures. On the one hand, decades ofempirical studies suggest that purely textual material may produce differentbeliefs about factual matters by virtue of details such as the choice of font;there is not a clear, pristine mapping from text statements to individuals’perceptions about matters of fact. On the other hand, there are many instancesin which a photograph, drawing, or other graphic image is undoubtedly bettersuited than text alone to conveying factual information; the poison symbol usedon many products and the appearance of pictures and diagrams throughout atypical medical or scientific text provide ready examples.

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